John Howard Griffin
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John Howard Griffin (June 16, 1920 - September 9, 1980) was a white journalist and author who wrote largely in favor of racial equality. He is best known for darkening his skin and journeying through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to experience segregation in the Deep South in 1959. He wrote about the experience in his critically acclaimed Black Like Me.
Griffin was born in Dallas, Texas on June 16, 1920 to parents John Walter Griffin and Lena May Griffin, née Young.[1] He studied French and literature at the University of Poitiers and medicine at the École de Médicine. At age 19, he worked as a medic in the French Resistance army, and then served 39 months stationed in the South Pacific in the United States Army Air Corps. He became disabled and was decorated for bravery.
Griffin wrote two major novels, The Devil Rides Outside and Nuni, during a decade of blindness between 1947 and 1957, the result of an accident during his service in US air force. He regained his vision.
His best known work has been Black Like Me, a first-person account of a 6-week journey through the Deep South disguised as a black man.
Griffin converted to Catholicism in 1952 and became a Third Order Carmelite. He was a lifelong Democrat.
Throughout his life, Griffin lectured and wrote on race relations and social justice. Griffin was awarded the Pacem in Terris Award. It was named after a 1963 encyclical letter by Pope John XXIII that calls upon all people of good will to secure peace among all nations. Pacem in Terris is Latin for "Peace on Earth." He died on September 9, 1980 due to diabetes and/or several other health problems, but not skin cancer or other complications of his skin darkening, as some believe.[2]
His works include:
- The Devil Rides Outside (1952)
- Nuni (1956)
- Land of the High Sky (1959)
- Black Like Me (1961)
- The Church and the Black Man (1969)
- A Time to be Human (1977)
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- "A Revolutionary Writer", John H. Griffin
- Full-view books about John H. Griffin at Google Book Search
- John Howard Griffin Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin
