Black Like Me - 972 Words

Black Like Me Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin is a Multicultural story set in the south around the late 1950s in first person point of view about John Griffin in 1959 in the deep south of the east coast, who is a novelist that decides to get his skin temporarily darkened medically to black. What Griffin hopes to achieve is enough information about the relationships between blacks and whites to write a book about it.The overall main obstacle is society, and the racial divide in the south with the whites. John begins his journey in New Orleans where he gets his first taste of what it is like to be black. He meets a shoeshiner named Sterling Williams who gives Griffin friendship, and the opportunity to be incorporated in the African†¦show more content†¦When Griffin was kicked off the car, he was left a far distance from everything. He reached a small convince store on the road, in which the owners would not let him in until he begged them. As he walked on, a young black male offered him a ride and a place to sleep in his house with his wife and six children. Later that evening, Griffin had a reoccurring nightmare about white men and women, with their faces of heartlessness staring at him. As Griffin was about to leave, he tried to give money to the family for his gratitude, but they would no accept it, so he just left the money there. Griffin then hitchhiked to a small bus station and bought a ticket to Montgomery. When he got to Montgomery, he called his wife and children and then changed back to white. Griffin also witnessed a skirmish on the bus when 2 blacks would not move into 1 seat, so a white women could sit down. A large white man was about to hurt someone, but the white women told him to stop. Griffin had enough of this and changed back to white in the station restroom. Afterwards, he called the Sepia ( A News Paper ) editors and made an appointment for a story in New Orleans with a photographer. After the story was done, he flew to Mansfield as a white man to be in an editorial conference. Then Griffin flew to Hollywood for a TV show, New York for an interview in Time magazine and many other places for stories. Griffins mother started to get hate calls from some ofShow MoreRelatedLiterary Analysis Of Black Like Me 1389 Words   |  6 PagesUniversity Of South Florida A Literary Analysis of â€Å"Black Like Me† Raed Margushi Academic Preparation Lisana Mohamed 4th of December, 2015 A Literary Analysis of â€Å"Black Like Me† John Howard Griffin was a writer who wanted to write about the truth. In dealing with the racial discrimination problems in the United States, Griffin wanted to write about the realities of the situation. However, he was a white man. He empathized with the black people and wanted equality for them as well howeverRead MoreBlack Like Me804 Words   |  4 PagesBlack Like me The book Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin is a moving true story of how a white man manages to experience what it is like to be a â€Å"Negro† or black person in the 1950s. The author did this social experiment by taking medication and dying his skin a deep brown. He wanted to really experience the challenges and changes a black man in this time would go through. By traveling through the far south, Griffin got a taste of what real life was for a Negro. The experiment starts in theRead MoreBlack Like Me1031 Words   |  4 Pagesfor thousands of years, due to the built up ignorance and intolerance of prior generations passing along bad morals onto their offspring. In fact, it was not until the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education (EEOC) that whites and Blacks even began to attempt to integrate publicly. And even then, whites held an unreasonable amount of hostility against the African-American race. But even despite multiple failed attempts in the past, the government was finally beginning to gain groundRead MoreAnalysis Of Black Like Me1014 Words   |  5 PagesStetson Bates Black Like Me In the fall of 1959 John Howard Griffin, a white man, was engrossed with the state of the race/segregation issue in the southern United States. To accomplish this task JHG took special pills and exposed himself to ultraviolet rays to darken the pigmentation of his skin, on top of the pills he also rubbed in a special dye that caused his skin to become even darker. After â€Å"transforming† into a bald-headed, black man JHG set across the southern United States. On his adventureRead MoreEssay on Sociology: Black Like Me1713 Words   |  7 Pagesbased on their abilities. (Class notes, SOCI 201, Winter 2010) An example to illustrate this argument from Black Like Me is found on page 39. The elderly owner of the Y cafà © complained to Griffin about how unfair the economic system was to black people. Many brilliant black students graduated with great marks, but still ended up doing the most menial work or very few selected jobs. Many black people, therefore, chose not to educate themselves. As a result, the whites said they were not worthy of first-classRead MoreBlack Like Me : Book Report979 Words   |  4 PagesGrace Haskin Communication Research: Book Report November 21, 2014 Black Like Me Black Like Me is a research diary kept by John Griffin in 1959. Griffin, a white male, is bothered by racism and wants to experience what it is like to be black. He begins taking medication and rubs shoe polish on himself to darken the color of his skin to temporarily pass as a black man. Sepia, a black oriented magazine, sponsors Griffin’s study in exchange for written articles about the experience. With his newRead MoreBlack Like Me Sociological Terms1088 Words   |  5 Pages9, 2012 Black Like Me Black Like Me is a non-fiction book written by John Howard Griffin about what a black, middle-aged man has to go through every day in the Deep South. To find out what it is like to be a Negro, Griffin changes his skin color to that of a black. During his experiences, Griffin keeps a journal and that is what this book is. Black Like Me is a journal of Griffins feelings, experiences, pains, and friends. The setting of Black Like Me is intenselyRead MoreAnalysis Of The Book Black Like Me 1582 Words   |  7 PagesThe book â€Å"Black Like Me† presented a lot of interesting topics about racial diversity in the United States during the 1960’s. Howard Griffin embarked on a journey that no other man in this time would dare do. H decided to leave his privileged life as a white man behind and travel to the South and live as a black man, to really understand the pressures that they dealt with and to see things from a different perspective. The only real way to do so was to become a black man. He began taking medicationRead MoreMain Themes In Black Like Me800 Words   |  4 Pagesis less than just is less than man.† (162) Black Like Me is a nonfiction autobiographical memoir written by John Howard Griffin. This story was first published in 1961. Uniquely, this novel chronicles the experiences of the author, John Howard Griffin, as he travels through the deep south of the United States of America during the 1950s after undergoing a medical procedure to change his skin color in order to pose as an African American man. Black Like Me has also won the Anisfield-Wolf Book AwardRead More The Beauty of Color Essay2043 Words   |  9 Pagescaressed me immediately; in synch with the stopping of the engine was the start of us. I say us because I feel like that’s what it is to become intimate with someone, you merge, mesh, mix into some form of a united being. I enjoyed him. Intimacy was an act of passion. It didn’t take love to feel passion, and it didn’t take an appropriate union to become a part of another person. We were one as he kissed me, touched me. I felt him and he felt me. One. â€Å"You like that,† he said, panting like some needy