30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South
by Bill Steigerwald
In 1948 most white people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for the 10 million African Americans living in the South. But that suddenly changed after Ray Sprigle, a famous white journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a black man in the Jim Crow South.
Escorted through the South’s parallel black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a historic black civil rights pioneer from Atlanta, Sprigle met with sharecroppers, local black leaders, and families of lynching victims. He visited ramshackle black schools and slept at the homes of prosperous black farmers and doctors.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter’s series was syndicated coast to coast in white newspapers and carried into the South only by the Pittsburgh Courier, the country’s leading black paper. His vivid descriptions and undisguised outrage at “the iniquitous Jim Crow system” shocked the North, enraged the South, and ignited the first national debate in the media about ending America’s system of apartheid.
Six years before Brown v. Board of Education, seven years before the murder of Emmett Till, and thirteen years before John Howard Griffin’s similar experiment became the bestseller Black Like Me, Sprigle’s intrepid journalism blasted into the American consciousness the grim reality of black lives in the South.
Author Bill Steigerwald elevates Sprigle’s groundbreaking exposé to its rightful place among the seminal events of the early Civil Rights movement.
Chris Hayes and I have something in common in the Strip
Chris Hayes of MSNBC and I don't overlap much when it comes to politics, and his book sales are far higher than mine. But our race-centric works of nonfiction are bumping against each other trying to attract eyeballs in the sidewalk display window of Bradleys' Books...
Help celebrate the publication of ’30 Days a Black Man’
On Saturday evening, in a beautifully restored and re-purposed old city firehouse in the heart of Pittsburgh, there's going to be a semi-gala book publication party for my new book 30 Days A Black Man. Don't expect a jazz band or any hard booze at the Firehouse at...
About Bill Steigerwald
Bill Steigerwald is a veteran journalist from Pittsburgh. His new nonfiction book “30 Days a Black Man” tells the amazing but forgotten story about an undercover mission by a Pittsburgh newspaperman into the Jim Crow South in 1948 that shook up the whole country. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle’s nationally syndicated series “In the Land of Jim Crow” exposed the iniquities and humiliations suffered by ten million black Americans in the segregated South. It shocked the white people of the North, angered the South and started the first national debate in the media about ending America’s legal apartheid. Kirkus Review said “30 Days a Black Man” is “a fascinating account of an anti-Jim Crow muckraking adventure…” that Steigerwald turned “into rollicking, haunting American history.” … READ MORE
Recent Comments