John Howard Griffin (7:27)

From the private journals of John Howard Griffin. Saturday, October 31, 1959. Next Tuesday, I am to leave here, go to New Orleans and have my body darkened. And then I'm to travel and live as a Negro in the deep South. I am to study what discrimination and segregation based on color accomplish in their effects on man's body and spirit. What will this do to my parents, my wife and children? Not only in the unpleasantness we anticipate from racist neighbors and friends, but in some deeper realm of our existence. We are, after all, Southerners.

Dr. Dennis Black (8:09)

Ever notice your dog slowing down and having health issues and wonder, what can I do to make them better? Well, my friend, add Ruffgreens to your dog's food for 90 days and I guarantee you'll see changes that will amaze you. Greetings, naturopathic doctor Dennis Black, inventor of ruffgreens here, and I invite you to give your pup the Ruff Greens 90 day challenge. In the first 30 days, you'll see shinier coats and increased energy. By day 60, your dog will have a stronger immune system, less shedding, improved joint function, all due to the live nutrients that you've added to their diet. And at 90 days, better digestion, reduced inflammation, improved heart health, and you may even have reduced their cancer risk. Fetch your dog a free Jumpstart trial bag today. Go to ruffgreens.com use promo code 90day. That's ruffgreens.com Use promo code 90day. You just cover the shipping. You don't have to change your dog's food to improve your dog's health. Just add a scoop of rough greens.

John Howard Griffin (9:08)

Living in a land where our lives have been formed by the tainted atmosphere of white superiority. We bear those wounds so deeply within us. Can one ever root out these mysterious, spontaneous, deeper reactions of the viscera? From an essay entitled the Intrinsic Other, Lionel Trilling has remarked that culture is a prison unless we know the key that unlocks that door. It's a common anthropological truism that the prisoners of any given culture tend to regard those of almost any other culture, no matter how authentic that culture, as merely underdeveloped versions of their own imprisoning culture, as intrinsically other, intrinsically different as men. This intrinsic difference always implies some degree of inferiority. Implicit in this process is a consent to racism. Racism begins when we draw up an indictment against a whole people merely by considering them as a whole, as underdeveloped versions of ourselves. The Nazis drew up an indictment against a whole people. The world Jewish community in America and in Africa. We have drawn up an indictment against whole peoples, the dark skinned peoples. This has led to the dehumanization of all men, white and black. And these learned behavior patterns are so profoundly ingrained in us that even when we're intellectually liberated from our prejudices, we often remain emotionally imprisoned by them. After attending grade school in Fort Worth public schools, Griffin was further educated in France.

John Howard Griffin (11:04)

And in this I had a schoolmate, a companion, who was a French Jew, and he was involved in the beginnings of the French Resistance, the French underground, in a program to smuggle Jewish refugees out of Germany. He was working alone. He asked me to work with him. I became part of the team. We were the Diazins to receive Jewish families in Tour that had been brought by another team. And our job was to take them, to hide them in Tour until we could find transportation and then get them to the port of San Nazaire, from which we hope to get them on boats to England. That was how I happened to get into this. It at the time seemed to be just another activity that had to be done. And this has haunted me in all my work since. We could sit as students, intellectually preoccupied with the pros and cons of racism, and never have the faintest hint of what this actually boiled down to in human lives. I began to get this kind of an awareness when it became my job one night shortly before the fall of Tours, to go into these rooms where we had sequestered these Jewish families, the parents and their children, and give them the sad news that we weren't going to succeed, that we brought them this far and we couldn't move them further. You had to have safe conduct papers to move any adult. For any adult to travel more than two or three blocks in any direction, you were constantly being stopped and asked for your papers. Well, I went into these rooms and we closed the doors, and I rarely had to give the news. Most of the parents would say something like, well, we know it's over for us. We know that the first thing the Nazis will do when they come through is round us up and ship us back to the concentration camps. And then they would ask me to do this thing. We could move children under the age of 15. And they would say, they would ask me if I would take their children. And sitting on those beds or in those chairs in those rooms, I began for the first time to see the difference between what happens inside rooms like this and what happens outside. The first of these terrible awarenesses was the realization that I was sitting in the presence of massive human tragedy, the tragedy of parents who loved their children. And these were mostly educated, intellectual people whom we passed through, parents who had very few illusions that they were going to see those children again and who were yet giving the children away to a virtual stranger so that the children, at least, would escape the camps. And that overwhelmed me in this sense, in the realization that I could go outside of those rooms and I could go down in the streets, and I could see my former colleagues, schoolmates, and they considered themselves all perfectly decent. And yet they would go right on rationalizing, justifying the racism that led to what was happening in those rooms up there. And that became a kind of a horrendous symbol to me of the part of the tragedy of racism, wherever it exists, is that some people experience it from inside those rooms and see it as the ultimate tragedy that can become. Whereas others never get this kind of a glimpse and can go on intellectualizing, rationalizing, and justifying the racism that leads to the tragedies in that kind of room, to get that done with. We were successful in getting a lot of the children out. And one of the first things that I did after the war was to go back to France. And my purpose in going back to France was to find those children and put them back in the hands of their parents. And we dealt with somewhere in the vicinity of 150 adults. And I used all of the organizations that were then in force locating missing people. We never found a single one of those parents who survived the concentration camps. That was the beginning of my awareness of where racism goes, if it's allowed to go unchecked. It became a very compelling experience to me in retrospect, because it was the first time that I ever really encountered the victims of a merciless kind of racism in a living situation. We had been very, very preoccupied with racism as students in France during the rise of Hitler. I must say that I did not, at that time, equate the race.

Dr. Dennis Black (16:17)

Ever notice your dog slowing down and having health issues and wonder, what can I do to make them better? Well, my friend, add rough greens to your dog's food for 90 days and I guarantee you'll see changes that will amaze you. Greetings, naturopathic doctor Dennis Black, inventor of ruff greens here, and I invite you to give your pup the Ruff Greens 90 day challenge. In the first 30 days, you'll see shinier coats and increased energy. By day 60, your dog will have a stronger immune system, less shedding, improved joint function, all due to the live nutrients that you've added to their diet. And at 90 days, better digestion, reduced inflammation, improved heart health, and you may even have reduced their cancer risk. Fetch your dog a free Jumpstart trial bag today. Go to ruffgreens.com use promo code 90day. That's ruffgreens.com Use promo code 90day. You just cover the shipping. You don't have to change your dog's food to improve your dog's health. Just add a scoop of rough greens.

John Howard Griffin (17:16)

Racism of the Nazis with the racism. We thought racism in those days was anti Semitism. You know, we didn't see any connection. It wasn't until I came back to the United States after the escaping from France, when France fell, that I began to hear the things that I've heard all my life. And I saw how absolutely similar they were to the things that we had been hearing the Nazis saying in the justification of their anti Semitism. And in the war situation. I didn't really begin to become aware of this until I was in the Pacific in the army, where we had this bludgeoning injustice of black troops who were segregated, who were supposedly fighting for the principles of freedom and so forth, and who inevitably were put in the areas where they held the perimeters. We had to go on burial details to bury black men whom he had placed between us and the enemy, you know. And so there we had the illusion that when we. When the war was over and we got back to the United States, nobody could ever again perpetrate or perpetuate this kind of an injustice on black men. And of course, we came back and we didn't Hit the States before we found out that it was the same old rot, you know, and black men have been through that for three years. Army fighting overseas with these rights, couldn't stand it anymore.

John Howard Griffin (18:47)

We flew to San Antonio and waited to be mustered out. Standing in the sunlight, my attention was attracted to a tall, heavily decorated Negro sergeant who was being berated by the young corporal in charge of getting our group into the proper lines. You may be a damned hero overseas, but you're nothing but a nigger here. And don't you forget it. I approached the gathering group. The sergeant, his body in a violent tremble, whispered, I've been four years fighting for this mother jabbing country. I'm damned if I'm coming back to this. You're back to it all right, and don't you forget it, the corporal said. And an older soldier edged toward the Negro who was losing all control of his nerves. The crowd, made up of overseas veterans, converged around the two men. If the sergeant, now that he was home, were to strike the white corporal, God knows if he would ever get out of the brig. And the corporal appeared to be egging him into such an action. Even those of us who were Southerners could not stomach this abuse of a man who had fought overseas in a segregated unit for his country. We knew that Negro troops had held the perimeter between us and the Japanese. That was an injustice we found difficult to swallow, no matter how prejudiced we might be. The older soldier elbowed in past the sergeant and spoke to the corporal in a toneless voice. You better shut that big mouth of yours right now. I'm in charge here. The corporal said, your sergeant stripes don't mean a thing to me. All of you are under my orders. Listen, you screwed up little USO soldier. You lay off him and right now are you going to walk through life without an ass? The rest of us nodded agreement. The corporal shut up. The black sergeant stood there shaking his head and saying in a thin voice, I can't stand this. I know I can't stand coming back to this. And we drifted away from him, leaving him alone, wondering what would become of such a man. The world was not full of little white corporals, but there were still too many.

John Howard Griffin (20:56)

I remember Dwight Dumond, a great anti slavery historian at the University of Michigan. One day I was visiting his class and we hadn't talked about this kind of thing very much, but he got up and roared to the class and he said, what if, God forbid, we should all lose our sight? Within 24 hours we would see the speciousness of all of our racist reasoning, sight is enormously deceptive. I remember I learned very quickly after losing my sight that the only way that you can judge a fellow human being is simply to judge him by what he is. I had lost 95% of the sight. And when I really became blind, I began to do studies at the philosophical level dealing with racism wherever it might be. And in doing these studies, I, as a person without sight, I interviewed a lot of people, whites and blacks. And, well, one of the deepest shocks to me was the realization in doing these interviews was the awful realization that I couldn't tell unless somebody told me whether the person I was interviewing was white or black. I'd been brought up to think that blacks had a characteristic order. I'd been brought up to think that blacks had characteristic speech patterns. These are regional patterns, you know, these are not ethnic patterns. And I do believe that without that lost, I would have carried those delusions on through. And then, of course, we were hearing all over this country the great American ethic which we sincerely believed we were practicing. And that was that in America, of all places, we judge every man by his quality as a human individual. And this was a thing that haunted me. You know, why couldn't we judge as sighted people the way we had to judge as sightless people? And that's an important factor. That's one of the things that cause drive black people almost to madness of frustration is the manner in which we misuse this great gift of sight by accommodating it to our prejudices rather than accommodating our prejudices to what we actually see in him.

John Howard Griffin (23:30)

In 1957, 11 years after loss of sight, after lengthy medical treatment, sight was partially restored October 28, 1959, from Black Like Me. For years, the idea had haunted me, and that night it returned more insistently than ever. If a white man became a Negro, what adjustments would he have to make? What is it like to experience discrimination based on skin color? Something over which one has no control. How else, except by becoming a negro, could a white man hope to learn the truth? I decided I would do this November 7th. I had my last visit with the doctor in the morning. The treatment had not worked as rapidly or completely as we'd hoped. But I had a dark undercoating of pigment which I could touch up perfectly with stain. We decided I must shave my head. Since I had no curl, the dosage was established, and the darkness would increase as time passed. From there, I was on my own. I decided to shave my head. That evening and begin my journey. It took hours and many razor blades before I finished. In the flood of light against white tile, the face and shoulders of a stranger, a fierce, bald, very dark Negro, glared at me from the glass in no way resembled me. The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of another stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship. All traces of the John Griffin I had been were wiped from existence. Even the senses underwent a change so profound it filled me with distress. My inclination was to fight against it. I'd gone too far. I knew now that there is no such thing as a disguised white man. When the black won't rub off. A black man is wholly a Negro, regardless of what he once may have been. I was a newly created Negro who must go out that door and live in a world unfamiliar to me.

John Howard Griffin (25:54)

No matter how open you are, there has to be an illusion. If you've been brought up the way I have or been brought up without having lived the experience, there has to be the illusion which I held, and that was that black people lived essentially the same kind of lives that we did, only racism placed all kinds of impediments in their paths and they had more, less convenient lives. I think a lot of people who are really want and demand racial justice for minorities demand it from that point of view, why should they be inconvenienced? And, of course, the profoundly shocking thing of living the experience was to find out that this wasn't a matter of inconveniences. This was a matter of a whole totally different way of functioning that went on 24 hours a day. And we whites who have grown up in close communication with blacks never dream the reality of that total need to alter everything. And, you know, I really thought that black people suffered most from the overt bigot. And of course, my deepest shock was the discovery that we rarely had contact with the overt bigot. It was the nice kind of person who didn't dream what he was doing in condoning this kind of thing who made it so profoundly difficult for us. And I'd like to illustrate that with one little point. For example, in my life, in most people's lives, when we get up in the mornings, we don't have to do anything special. We plan our day. I call you where we need to be. Well, as a black person in those days, we couldn't do that. We didn't have that kind of freedom. Because, you see, there were Many places where we could not get food, There were many places where we could not get drink, There were many places where we had no right to use restaurants. And so what we would have to do would be to wake up in the morning if we were going to leave the Quarter, to go out looking for work, to go out and doing our work. We would have to sit down and do this degrading thing. We would have to ask ourselves, at what hour am I going to have hunger? What hour will I have thirst? What hour will I need to use a restroom? And then we would have to plan our day not according to where we would want to be necessarily, but so that when those needs arose, we would have be in an area, find ourselves in an area where we could answer those needs. And this is an extraordinary thing when you live it 24 hours a day, on a day by day basis. Because I think it's impossible to imagine how utterly degrading this constant need to be preoccupied with the body self is, you know. And so our resentments would be in this line. We would see that nice looking lady, maybe a teacher, that nice looking man that wouldn't harm a person. And our resemblance would really lead us to want to go up and shake our fist in their face and say, do you know what you've got? Your mind is free to dwell on something better. But because you won't repudiate the system, you're like some giant white hand that keeps my mind crammed down into my viscera and never, never liberates us from this concern for our body self. And this was an appalling kind of reality to me. And it led to this constant tearing. I remember I once went into a drugstore in New Orleans that I had been before as a white man. And I remember that the young lady, because black people talk about all whites, she was one that was talked about as a good white in those days we used that term. And she didn't recognize anything about me. She sold me whatever I needed. It was in downtown in the French Quarter of New Orleans. And I would have gone and written a very good account of that encounter because she had a natural basic human courtesy that looked upon me as a human individual and not just as all negritude, but I had a physical need. And it led me to ask this question which began to shed great light how. On how even our kindness can be cruel in this kind of situation. And I asked her this and it was a true question. I'm diabetic and I was in trouble and I told Her I said, pardon me, but I'm diabetic. Could you tell me where would be the nearest place I could find water? And this young lady, white lady, was immediately concerned. She wanted to be helpful. She ignored a soda fountain three steps to her right, and she said, now, let's see, where were the newspapers place be? And she finally said, I'll tell you what I believe. You go out that door and you take a left and you go up to that big double street that's three blocks. And then she counted on her fingers to make certain she was giving me the right direction. She told me to go 14 more blocks down that big double street, and she thought I'd find a place. And suddenly realized that if anybody suggested to that nice, kind, concerned young lady that there's anything cruel in sending human beings sick 17 blocks in search of water when water was available three steps away, she'd have been crushed. She thought she was being helpful. She thought she was being good. Well, you multiply this thousands and thousands of times and you begin to very quickly get.

Dr. Dennis Black (31:33)

Ever notice your dog slowing down and having health issues and wonder, what can I do to make them better? Well, my friend, add rough greens to your dog's food for 90 days and I guarantee you'll see changes that will amaze you. Greetings naturopathic doctor Dennis Black, inventor of ruffgreens here, and I invite you to give your pup the Ruffgreens 90 Day Challenge. In the first 30 days, you'll see shinier coats and increased energy. By day 60, your dog will have a stronger immune system, less shedding, improved joint function, all due to the live nutrients that you've added to their diet. And at 90 days, better digestion, reduced inflammation, improved heart health, and you may even have reduced their cancer risk. Fetch your dog a free Jumpstart trial bag today. Go to ruffgreens.com use promo code 90day. That's ruffgreens.com Use promo code 90day. You just cover the shipping. You don't have to change your dog's food to improve your dog's health. Just add a scoop of rough greens.

John Howard Griffin (32:32)

Into the heart of what is so utterly maddening and what utterly changes your existence. It wasn't the 17 blocks. Every black man that I've ever told that story to said, don't stress that. 17 blocks. That's not the important thing. The important thing was that you as a human individual stood in the presence of another person who was a human individual. And that person recognized you as a human individual up to the point where you asked a question which suddenly turns you into all blackness, you know, into all negritude. If I had asked her, if I'd said, I'm sick, would you give me water? She would have given me that water. But I didn't ask that. I said, where is the nearest place I can find water? And that young lady formed the way all of us were, all of us good whites. And I don't hesitate to say, utterly damaged by that formation and dehumanized by that formation, suddenly just saw me as if in other being. And it was this that drove you up the wall, you see, because the illusion was when we had the civil rights legislation and they took down those white only scientists now illegal to have them, was that something had been corrected. Nothing was corrected because those attitudes weren't a bit, weren't at all corrected. And you still stood there in front of your churches, in front of your libraries, in front of your schools, in front of all these places. And you stood there as this other being, which means that you have to live, not just the inconveniences, which are nothing, but you have to live with this profound change in your whole way of living, which makes it a dangerous way to live and a nerve wracking way to live. I remember one of the first churches that I went to after I became black was ironically, and it wasn't planned this way at all, it was a church where a year prior to that time I had been the guest lecturer at a fundraising event in that church. And in that church I had signed copies of my earlier books. I had been received with all this marvelous warmth and love. When I had left, men had told me, said, it's been a great experience having you, Mr. Griffin, and if you're ever back in this area, do come and see us. And they meant it. You know, that's the sad, awful part of all of this. Well, they didn't anticipate and I didn't anticipate at all that when I got back I would be altered in pigment. But I wasn't altered any other way. I kept my name, I kept my clothing, I kept my background, and I answered everything truthfully. But all I had to do was approach that church. And the same kind of men who had sent me away with such love and such warmth now came out and planted themselves in front of the door. And since you always blame the victim, they spoke to me in this kind of language and said, what you trying to do, get yourself in trouble? You get over that nigger church where you Belong, you cut this out right away. And since that was the first experience I had that way, it's the one that has lingered the most horrifyingly in my mind. Because there's something that the mind can't encompass about standing outside of a door of a church from which you've just rudely been driven and listening while inside people are worshiping. And then that morning inside, they began seeing this hymn. It was a hymn called Walking in the path of Jesus. And you had to wonder, are they out of their minds or am I out of my mind? Well, if this happened once, it wouldn't be worth telling. But it happened absolutely consistently in my own Catholic church and in the other churches of other denominations that I approached. And in our homes at night, you see, black people talk incessantly about this kind of thing. We would talk about what happened to us in the day, and we would always ask, how can they, meaning the bites, fail to see that their failure to repudiate this system of contradictories ends up contaminating the highest of what we consider human institutions, the places of learning, the schools, the libraries, the churches. You know, whites apparently didn't see this, and we as blacks could not understand how they could fail to see this.

John Howard Griffin (37:16)

From the church and the black man. 1969. Where at least were the churches, the identifiable men of God, 28 Southern Methodist ministers, stood up in Mississippi and were repudiated. Fathers John and William Marco and Father La Farge and others cried out, but they were too few, and too often such men were suppressed by their own church leaders, or at least attempts were made to silence. In general, religiously identifiable men were silent and invisible. It would have been helpful if they'd done nothing but stand visibly and weep at the sight of racists beating up black women and children. In practice, however, despite national and world policies at local levels, all over this land, black men were faced with what could only be interpreted as equivocation in the churches.

John Howard Griffin (38:18)

If I arrived in a community in Louisiana, say, the city of Alabama, and I arrived just after the mass that was for blacks, and I did this one Sunday, I went, and just as the mass was finished and the priest was a white priest, and he said, I'm obliged to tell you that since you validly missed mass by being traveling, you're no longer obligated to attend mass, your Sunday obligation is lifted. And I said, well, isn't there another church? Surely you don't have just one mass on the Sunday? He said, yeah, there's a church three blocks away, and they've got four more masses today. But he said, I'm obliged to tell you that since you validly missed the mass that was destined for you, you don't have to go. And I said, do you believe that, father? He said, of course I don't believe it, but I've got to say it. And if I had gone into that other church, I don't know what would have happened. When, as southern catholics, we used to be told that the church for black people was in black areas for the convenience of black people. But of course, anyone could receive the sacramentic church. I believed that up until I did this experience. And what we found was that it was utterly untrue that you could be driven away from a white catholic church if there were a black catholic church in the area. And in the area might mean 17 miles away, it might mean 20 miles away, it might mean 23 miles away. One black lady, a catholic, moved into a Louisiana community. She was the first black catholic in that community. And that congregation took up and paid for a car to drive her 23 miles to the nearest black catholic church so that she could go to mass without having to come to mass in this church. When there was no black catholic church anywhere in the area, then we were allowed to come to mass, but we were put in either the crying room where they keep the little babies with a glass partition between you and the congregation, or we were obliged to sit on the back pew and the news was communicated to us that we must wait till all whites had received communion and returned and were seated before we approached the communion table. And if we did get up and approach the communion table, we risked being refused the sacrament. And for anyone to whom the sacraments in the catholic church have any meaning, almost the ultimate bitterness for a black man was at this one moment which is supreme in the life of any catholic. Even this one moment was thus tainted because you know you could do something wrong, that you would be denied that. And I don't know how I think I would collapse with just sheer for grin, disgust and grief if such a thing happened at that time. Not because I was denied, but because it would show the degree of utter hypocrisy and dehumanization that had occurred within the institution which I professed my belief.

John Howard Griffin (41:42)

This kind of thing happens, and it happens with overwhelming frequency. It is an open scandal to black men and to some white men who learn of it. Certainly it's no secret in the churches, though the churches have attempted to make it a secret. And it is not limited to the south either, as black people can everywhere testify, we have lived under two damaging delusions in this land. First, the delusion of southern white men that we knew everything about what we patronizingly called our Negroes and that no outsider could possibly understand. Second, the delusion in non southern areas that it's not like that here. We still hear widespread expression of both delusions. These expressions come from perfectly sincere white men. No black man believes either of them. Of course, the experience of blackness gives the lie to both delusions.

John Howard Griffin (42:50)

I often talk about the south and I, no matter where I go, with whom I speak, there is an illusion that I simply am unable to overcome. And that is the illusion that he's talking about someplace else and someone else. I have Canadian bishops tell me with all the joviality and kindness in the world that I just don't understand Canadian Indians, that they've worked with them for years, that they don't have any morals. That whole catalogue then of the stereotype, and I just wonder where would it ever end? I went to Canada two, three years ago at the request of the Bishop of Winnipeg to set up a dialogue between Indians, Canadian Indians and the power structure, I guess, or representatives of the power structure. And it was really fascinating to me because the same I had set in on so many of these between black leadership and white leadership in this country, and the very same verbal attitudes that drove black people up a tree were driving Canadian Indians up a tree. And the first of these was the constant illusion that in a community it's the Indian's problem. Instead of saying it's calling it our problem, your problem, constant referring to Indians as you people use of this kind of separating terms. But more than anything else, the awful illusion that the best thing that we can do for you as a Canadian Indian is to make you an imitation of what we are, you see, which is utterly and deeply degrading. And I may be treading on some pretty sacred myths here at this point, but one of the things that I discovered we've all in history, certainly everybody, people who are Catholics, have talked about the Jesuit martyrs to the Indian missions, Isaac, people like this. And one of the things that I found was that the deepest resentment that Canadian Indians expressed to me in times of great anger was resentment against the Jesuits. We all had thought that Jesuit been heroes in this kind of situation. And of course what it boils down to is that seternal insistence which says that you can only benefit by becoming an imitation me, you know, the constant judging of others and of course basically physically when you get down to it, when a man has the physical appearance of a Canadian or an American Indian, or of an American or Canadian black man, this becomes moot because we're judging by appearance and not by. By what he is. I believe that in the church. I must say I've done quite a lot of talking recently in this area. There has come certainly among us in the seminaries, in the training, a tremendous realization that we have continuously shown contempt for the culture of others, the cultural strength of others, and that very, very often missionary activity has involved the total degradation and the dilution of cultures that could have strengthened. And this is a mistake that's being made less and less frequently, thank God.

John Howard Griffin (46:40)

In my own life, this error was once thrown into my own face. I was living on a Pacific island doing language studies. I considered with great affection my subjects to be primitive, unevolved people, aboriginals. There was no question but what theirs was an inferior and mine a superior culture. They were others. After many months on the island, however, whenever I went from one village to the other through the jungles, I still had to have a five year old lad guide me. I couldn't find a trail. If I were lost, I would not have known how to survive, what to eat in the jungles. It became obvious to me that within the context of that culture, I was clearly the inferior. An adult man who could not have survived without the guidance of a child. And from the point of view of the local inhabitants, the valid point of view, I was other, inferior and they were superior. But such perceptions are difficult because our culture forms us in attitudes at the emotional level very early in our lives.

John Howard Griffin (47:55)

Now what I do see is that an awful lot of educators have begun to catch on. They know something wrong, they don't know how, how to recognize the symptoms, they don't know what to do about it. I tell them that most parents, they're afraid of always of offending the parent. I said, in the first place you can correct these errors without the parent ever knowing. And in the second place, the parent would probably be delighted. Most parents don't want to do this. It's really society that does this. There's culture that does this, that imprisons us very early in these mistaken concepts. I said, the first time you hear this child refer to children of other ethnic groups or even of other nationalities in stereotype, this is the time you can nip it. And it's very easy to nip. Nowadays, what we are seeing is a massive fragmentation of this kind of imprisoning cultural concept and I am certain that this can be done by parents with a child, or by a teacher with a child, or by any adult who chooses to do this in a way that really will hold.

John Howard Griffin (49:21)

April 7, 1960. They burned a cross just above our house at the Negro school. And someone remarked, they should have burned it on my land. I wish they had. I wish they had. It would have been far better than burning it at the school.

John Howard Griffin (49:42)

My wife and I had very, very little delusions that we were going to escape being attacked. There's a kind of cunning that seems almost satanic at times and that I was attacked where I am utterly vulnerable in my parents and in my children. Even the first things against me were relatively mild. But the first things against my parents were terrifying. My parents were terrorized by being constantly telephoned and told what these mysterious peep telephoners were going to do to me. Something that parents can't bear. The other things that were hideous were what they were willing to do to my children. My daughter, who's now 20, was five at that time. And I went one day to Dallas, to the Carmelites. The phone rang and we were very careful to protect our children as much as we could from the. The hate and the bitterness. And my daughter. It was. The phone was close to the kitchen. My wife was working the kitchen and my man Susie picked it up. And my wife listened. She was talking pleasantly, so she suppose she was talking to my parents. But it was a man who wanted to know if I was home. She said no and said he'd gone to Dallas for the afternoon. And he said, well, don't you hang up, I'm going to talk to you. And she said, all right. He said, do you know what your daddy is? And she said, yeah, my daddy's a writer. And he said, your daddy, I'll just have to go ahead and sit on this. He says, your daddy's a goddamn nigger loving son of a. And she said, well, you shouldn't talk like that. And the only thing that she recognized in all of that mess was nigger, you know. And he said, well, that's what he is, you goddamn nigger. Love is son of a bitch. And my wife heard my daughter say, in very precise terms, she said, you should say that my father is a God damn Negro. By that time my wife had blown to the phone and torn it out of my daughter's hand. But she got there just as my daughter was saying, well, I don't think you've got much education, really. There was no trauma for the child at All. But when I got back, my wife told me what had happened. I said, I didn't know whether just to pick my children up and leave this country or whether to buy her candy and ruin her teeth for the next week or so. But you know, when people will do this to a little child, a parent is utterly defenseless. And of course, this is what we did. We had to have police protection. We did not really trust the police protection. And so I called people that I knew in the government and I said, look, this is outrageous. I want my parents protected and I can't really, I don't know if I can rely on local protection or not. And Dr. James Evans, who was with the Defense Department at that time, who's a black man, he told me, he said, well, Mr. Griffin, you've got the best protection you could possibly have. And I said, what are you talking about? And he said, every night for I don't know how long this was in winter, two black men from your community, they rotate, they are spending the night in the dark, sitting in the woods overlooking your house to see that nobody comes and bombs your car, bombs your house. And two more men every night are sitting in the woods overlooking your parents house. And no black person locally ever gave me a hint that this was going on. And I would never have known it except I spoke to Dr. Evans. Everybody in this work has been in danger of his life. There have been many people who have wanted to work with me, but it got to a point where it was a grave injustice because we weren't preparing them well enough. There are no satisfactions in this kind of work, you see, there are no tangible results. And PD east, my old friend from Mississippi, the white newspaper editor who suffered such tremendous reprisals because of his stance. I was ill. I was very ill. And he called me and he finally tracked me down. And he said, griffin, get yourself home and get in the hospital and take care of yourself. Said, you've got us all worried to death. And I said, pd, I can't quit now. Every man is needed. This is an utterly critical situation. And he said, well, you do a lot of meditating, don't you? And I said, well, not much anymore because I don't have any time, but I'd love to meditate. He said, well, next time you meditate, sit down and meditate on this. Did it ever occur to you that since you started this work, the situation has gotten progressively worse?

John Howard Griffin (54:48)

For 400 years, the dream has been an integrated society. Black men were dedicated to the American dream. Black Men really believed that it would be possible for white men to put aside prejudice. All black hopes and actions were directed to the one dream. Almost all black organizations were integration organizations. In recent years, the dream of integration began to crumble. It began to crumble as white men who spoke in favor of that eventual dream acted in a way to oppose it. Certainly no one can look closely at the events of the past years and fail to understand the black man's growing disillusionment with the dream.

John Howard Griffin (55:31)

Perhaps the last area in our land that's coming to any light is the whole legal and juridical profession. We have the most outrageous still discrimination. Precisely in the courts. For example, there is still no equality in bonding procedure. A black man arrested will be bonded out at perhaps five times the amount that a white man arrested on the same kind of charge will receive. Well, this is, you know, it's now an open and outrageous scandal. It was like when we used to function trying to get Jewish people out of Germany. The upholders and maintainers of the, quote, laws were part of the enemy. But again, you've got a ludicrous situation in this country in that certain thing. It has to be a federal offense. You see, a murder, for example, is not a federal offense, as you well know right now. When they passed the ordinances against interfering with anyone's right to register to vote, suddenly black people were not impeded in their attempts to register to vote in places like Macomb, Mississippi, for example. But they could go right in and they could register to vote. They would come out. The first man that did this in Macomb, as a matter of fact, was allowed to go in. Right. When he came out, he was shot and killed. Second man that went in to register to vote, it was beaten on the steps by a policeman with a crowd looking on. And so that there was no federal offense, they didn't prevent him from the right to register to vote. They murdered. Murdered him. And murder is not a federal offense. So that's taken care of in the local court. So you've got that kind of an absurd thing. The thing that is so frightful to me is that we don't recognize the similarity between the race racism is directed against the black. The anti Semitism of the Nazis. For example, at the time of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, I began to become aware of the fact that in this land we were saying exactly the same thing, using the same kind of rationalization about black people that we had heard used against the jewels in Germany. The first of these things that really began to seep through was the realization that a first principle of racism is extreme. Always blame the victim. Jews were, we found they found ways to blame Jews for everything that happened in Nazi Germany, you know, even their own immolation. And always the news twisted this back so that the victim was the guilty party. And all of this kind of, if you had said this out loud, absolute idiot. You know, there was no I'm afraid we, we don't have the kind of wisdom to, to universalize this thing. We see these as different problems that don't overlap in principle. We don't draw the kind of parallels.

John Howard Griffin (58:42)

But almost all black men felt that white America, including white churchmen, are set in a kind of spiritual rigor mortis of racism. And therefore nearly all black Americans are militant for goals of manhood and self determination without necessarily being in agreement as to the methods of achieving this. Some black men favor black power concepts as the greatest hope. Others in great numbers still cling to the older hopes of reconciliation and conversion, all in being militantly determined that black men will be men. To judge from the polls, black men across the land have rejected violence to a higher degree than whites. Studies made in the spring of 1969 and published in the Detroit Free Press indicated that only 2% of black Americans have gone along with the advocates of violent disruption, while 89% have rejected them. It is still not too late. But if some spark does set the keg afire, it will be a senseless tragedy of ignorant against ignorant injustice answering injustice, a holocaust that will drag down the innocent and right thinking masses of human beings. And then we will all pay for not having cried out for justice long ago. Another Visit with John Howard Griffin Mr. Griffin was recorded in his home in Fort Worth, Texas in 1975 in conversation with John Reeves of the CBC. And readings were from his published and unpublished works of the writings of John Howard Griffin that were quoted from those that are currently available in print are published by the Houghton Mifflin Company of Boston. Another Visit with John Hard Griffin was co produced by Earplay and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Earplay is made possible by grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts. This is npr, National Public Radio.