Black Like Me

John Howard Griffin, the author of Black Like Me, decided the only thing he could do to truly understand discrimination is to darken his skin and travel through america’s most segregated states. One of the most memorable quotes about his experience is when he said, “You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it terrifies you. I felt like saying, ‘What in God’s name are you doing to yourself?’”John Howard Griffin had unparalleled dedication to this novel. In 1964, Griffin was brutally attacked and beat with chains for writing this novel. There is no doubt that Black Like Me was revolutionary in the civil rights movement, and it should be read by everyone.