Hollywood hasn’t discovered my ’30 Days a Black Man’ history book yet. Perhaps no one out there has read the ‘haunting’ and ‘rollicking’ tale or seen these kindly blurbs from some smart and talented fellow journalists.
Editorial Reviews
Juan Williams at FOX News —–
As a story from the Jim Crow past, Bill Steigerwald’s recounting of Sprigle’s mission . . . reminds us of what an honest conversation about race can accomplish as we continue on the path toward a more equitable future.
Paul Theroux, travel guru —
This is a vivid, well-researched account of a journalistic coup. White Ray Sprigle passing for black in the Jim Crow South—the danger, the narrow escapes, the abuses, the revelations. But it is also a set of portraits: of the brave black men who helped Sprigle fulfill his assignment; a portrait of the Deep South; and a portrait of the United States in the late 1940s.
David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter —
Bill Steigerwald is an author who always delights and informs, here recounting the frightening story of two courageous men, one black and the other a white Pittsburgh newspaper reporter posing as black, traveling through the Jim Crow South of 1948 to expose a vicious and brutal system of racial segregation.
Jesse Holland, author and AP bureau guy in DC —
The courage displayed by Ray Sprigle and John Wesley Dobbs on their journey into the Deep South is one of the major feats of investigative journalism during the pre-Civil Rights era. Bill Steigerwald’s book is an unflinching examination of race relations in this country’s recent past and the true impact that uncompromising journalism can have on our world.
Smithsonian magazine —
Steigerwald sees Sprigle as an unlikely hero who delivered harsh truths to an audience that . . . might never have seen those stories given the era’s segregated press… [I]t’s a story worth discussing today.
Kirkus Review —
Fascinating account of an anti-Jim Crow muckraking adventure.Longtime journalist Steigerwald (Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about Travels with Charley, 2012, etc.) offers a valuable corrective in resurrecting Ray Sprigle (1886-1957), an old-school white Pittsburgh newspaperman who produced an exposé after traveling the South disguised as a black man. As Juan Williams notes in his foreword, “over thirty days, Sprigle learned of the daily humiliations experienced by blacks in the 1948 Deep South.” Before he details Sprigle’s tense journey, Steigerwald strongly depicts the pre-civil rights landscape, arguing that most white Americans could ignore blacks’ plight, and some enforced the color line. He focuses on once-prominent figures, including the NAACP’s driven head Walter Francis White (who actually appeared white), so-called “progressive segregationists” like journalist Hodding Carter, and determined middle-class blacks like John Wesley Dobbs, a Masonic Grand Master (and passionate Atlanta booster despite its segregation) recruited by White to guide Sprigle. He portrays Atlanta and Pittsburgh as cities in their primes, vastly different for black and white citizens, as was the country overall in 1948: “Civil rights and desegregation were in the headlines every day.” Sprigle, who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Ku Klux Klan associations of Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, was described by Time as “a hard-digging, hell-for-leather newsman.” Passing as a black man with a deep suntan and workman’s clothes, after learning that dyes would be toxic, Sprigle traveled through several states, from Atlanta to the Mississippi Delta, and avoided danger due to Dobbs’ counsel: “to stay out of trouble and avoid harm you had to be vigilant as well as meek, lowly, and docile. His newspaper stories were carried nationwide and turned into a book, yet Steigerwald concludes, “by Christmas of 1948, the intense debate over the future of Jim Crow segregation had burned out in the national media.” Sprigle’s audacity was forgotten, but Steigerwald turns it into rollicking, haunting American history.