Most people today — white and black — have no idea how awful Old Jim Crow was
The New Jim Crow. Jim Crow on steroids. Jim Crow 2.0. Jim Crow redux in a suit and tie....
Jim Crow has made quite a comeback lately -- in rhetorical and political overkill, anyway.
But most people — white and black — have no idea today how awful Old Jim Crow was.
If you want a good sense of how ten million blacks were oppressed, discriminated and humiliated every day under Old Jim Crow in 1948, check out Ray Sprigle's original 21-part series, which he wrote for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after spending a month living in the Deep South as a black man.
![Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow: The true story of a white newspaperman from Pittsburgh who posed as black man in 1948 and woke up the country to the iniquities of American apartheid by [Ray Sprigle, Bill Steigerwald]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fae248c8b-2cf6-4896-9492-9f5e8967ca56_357x500.jpeg "Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow: The true story of a white newspaperman from Pittsburgh who posed as black man in 1948 and woke up the country to the iniquities of American apartheid by [Ray Sprigle, Bill Steigerwald]")
My 2017 history book, 30 Days a Black Man, tells the whole story behind Sprigle's newspaper series, how it was blessed by the NAACP and the huge impact it had on a country that was strictly segregated in the South by law and in the North by fact.
I've read Steigerwald's book. It was so good I could barely put it down, and was of immense help to me in writing by own book on race and the newspaper family for whom Sprigle worked. This book oughta be a movie.