Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow -- 75 years later
On Aug. 9, 1948 Ray Sprigle's series about his undercover mission into the Deep South debuted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and 13 other newspapers. It was shocking then and still is.
Seventy five years ago Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star newspaper reporter Ray Sprigle disguised himself as a black man, went undercover for a month in the Jim Crow South and wrote a 21-part nationally syndicated newspaper series that exposed the iniquities and indignities of Jim Crow to the entire country for the first time.
What Ray Sprigle saw made him ashamed to be an American. What he wrote shocked the white North, angered the white South and pleased millions of black Americans. His series – which debuted Aug. 9, 1948 in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and 13 other papers -- has been largely forgotten by history, but today it is still as timely and powerful as it was in 1948.
Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow
By Bill Steigerwald
Ray Sprigle’s account of his daring undercover mission into the Jim Crow South hit the front pages of 14 Northern newspapers on August 9, 1948 like an atom bomb.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s star reporter told millions of readers in the first paragraph what his 21-part series was going to be about:
For four endless, crawling weeks I was a Negro in the Deep South. I ate, slept, traveled, lived Black. I lodged in Negro households. I ate in Negro restaurants. I slept in Negro hotels and lodging houses. I crept through the back and side doors of railroad stations. I traveled Jim Crow in buses and trains and streetcars and taxicabs. Along with 10,000,000 Negroes I endured the discrimination and oppression and cruelty of the iniquitous Jim Crow system.
Sprigle’s description of what he saw and experienced while disguised as black man in the Jim Crow South is largely forgotten, but for several months in 1948 it shook up the country.
Still powerful and timely 75 years later, his series shocked the white North, enraged the white South, pleased millions of black Americans and started the first important debate in the national media about ending the oppressive but legal racial segregation that existed in 17 states.
Clunkily called “I was a Negro in the South for 30 Days” in the Post-Gazette, Sprigle’s series was syndicated in a shorter version under the title “In the Land of Jim Crow.” Offered to 135 papers, it was picked up by 13 papers from New York City to Los Angeles – all white and all in the North.
More important, Sprigle’s dogged attack on the South’s beloved home-grown system of apartheid was also carried exclusively to millions of black readers in the South and North by the country’s largest black weekly, the Pittsburgh Courier.
The Courier, which ran the series enthusiastically on its front pages for seven weeks, was not exaggerating that much when it identified Sprigle as the “Nation’s No. 1 White Reporter.”
Sprigle’s name and his series are virtually unknown today. But in 1948 he was a nationally famous newsman and colorful 61-year-old reporter who had won a Pulitzer in 1938 for proving that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black of Alabama had been a member of the KKK.
An iconic celebrity in Pittsburgh, Sprigle was renowned for his crime and corruption stories and especially for his undercover exploits, which included booking himself into a horrid state mental hospital as a patient, working for a week as a scab in a striking coal mine and posing as a black-market meat salesman during World War II.
In early 1948, with the blessing and help of the NAACP’s dynamic Walter White, Sprigle was teamed up with John Wesley Dobbs, 66, an influential political and social leader from Atlanta whose grandson Maynard Jackson Jr. would become the city’s first black mayor.
In May of 1948, Dobbs drove Sprigle around the dusty and dangerous backroads of the Deep South for 3,000 miles. He introduced him to a cross-section of the South’s parallel black society – from dirt-poor sharecroppers and the families of lynching victims to dentists and rich farmers. He also took Sprigle to see ramshackle separate-but-unequal black schools.
When Sprigle wrote his series, which was essentially a 21-day Page One op-ed piece, he didn’t try to hide what he thought about the evils of Jim Crow or the stupidity and moral failings of the “master race” that invented and enforced its petty rules.
Making no pretense of editorial objectivity or balance, he mocked the South’s backward, racist culture. And he railed like a muckraker about many racial issues that still trouble us today, albeit in far less severe ways.
His topics included lynchings, the violent suppression of black voting rights, the blatant inequality of black education, the constant fear all blacks had of white violence and the failure of Atlanta’s all-white criminal “justice” system to protect black neighborhoods from criminals.
He also constantly shamed the South for “the wanton murders” and unjustified shootings of unarmed black men by police and civilians. And he wasn’t afraid to discuss touchy black issues like skin color and inter-racial sex.
Sprigle’s admittedly one-sided personal expose of the iniquities and indignities of Jim Crow greatly pleased black civil rights leaders like Walter White and his friend and ally Eleanor Roosevelt.
But his withering sarcasm -- not to mention his core argument that legal segregation violated the Constitution, desecrated America’s founding ideals of freedom and equality and deserved to be ended immediately -- triggered Jim Crow’s always touchy defenders.
Sprigle especially inflamed the South’s segregationist newspaper editors. They smeared the conservative Republican as a liberal Yankee trouble-maker, or as a communist, and never printed a word he wrote in their papers.
A week after Harry Truman defeated Thomas Dewey in November, Sprigle appeared on a popular radio public affairs program to debate the present and future of Jim Crow. His chief opponent was Hodding Carter, the brilliant newspaper editor from Greenville, Mississippi.
The top New York magazines and papers regularly published Carter because he was seen as the “liberal” voice of the New South. But he was still a staunch anti-integrationist Democrat who believed in keeping blacks and whites separated in schools and public spaces. (In 1948 The New York Times wrote nothing about Sprigle’s Jim Crow trip or his series, which was lauded in Time magazine and other print and electronic media places. It still hasn’t.)
Held in front of 1,500 people at Town Hall in New York City, the “Town Hall Meeting of the Air” debate was carried live in prime time by more than 200 ABC radio stations and two newborn TV stations.
At the end, Sprigle summed up his own position by saying to Carter, “I think that many of your problems of segregation would be solved by the simple recognition of the Negro in the South as a citizen of the United States, subject to the rights granted him and every other citizen by the Constitution.”
Sprigle never claimed to be an early civil rights crusader and always insisted he was just a newspaper man pursuing a great story. But what he saw in the Jim Crow South made him hate white people and made him ashamed to be an American.
Sprigle was a pioneer in his profession when it came to covering Jim Crow, which for six decades had been a glaring un-American elephant in the national newsroom.
His historic series came 13 years before John Howard Griffin’s blockbuster “Black Like Me,” six years before Roe v. Board of Education and seven years before the murder of Emmett Till caught the attention of the Northern news media and made civil rights a nightly staple of network TV newscasts.
There’s no evidence Sprigle’s journalism changed history or influenced the people who were shaping it in 1948. But his impassioned expose provided a valuable, if immeasurable, early contribution to a quickening civil rights movement that spent the next 17 years fighting to bring full citizenship to tens of millions of Americans.
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Bill Steigerwald is a former newspaper journalist from Pittsburgh. His 2017 book “30 Days a Black Man” covers Ray Sprigle’s trip to the South and the impact his 1948 undercover mission had on the country. Sprigle’s entire 21-part series is reprinted in Steigerwald’s book “Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow.”
as someone who has also written about this topic, I can say that every American should read Steigerwald's book. It should be required reading in journalism history classes.