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'Black Like Me' By John Howard Griffin

108 Words1 Pages
"Black Like Me"'s author, John Howard Griffin, was born in Dallas, Texas on June 16, 1920. Husband of Elizabeth Ann Holland, Griffin and his wife had four kids and lived in Texas, his hometown. At the University of Poitiers in France, John Griffin studied literature and the French language. In 1946, his eyesight disappeared as the result of an accident in the United States Army Air Corp, but his sight was miraculously restored to him in 1957. Over the course of Griffin's lifetime, he wrote various literature works other than "Black Like Me", such as "The Devil Rides Outside" and "Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and
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Black Like Me is an incredible journey into what life was like in the Deep South during the late 1950s. John Griffin performed a social experiment to see what was life really like for blacks in the Southern States. John Griffin transformed himself into a black man and recorded his experiences into a book, Black Like Me. I was fascinated that 1950s science and medicine had advanced enough to allow someone to change the pigment of their skin. The procedure that Griffin underwent was simply taking pills and exposing himself to ultra violet rays (6).

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