![]() ![]() ![]() “I had an experience reading it where I was both deeply intrigued into this almost Twilight Zone story of what was happening to John Howard Griffin, but also pushing off from it, too,” he explained. Upon reading the book, Cole found himself grappling with conflicting emotions. “That in itself just kind of blew me away,” he said. Now I know what it feels like to be Black.” The tagline: “I changed the color of my skin. Louis on the Air, he first came across a movie poster for the 1964 film adaptation. ![]() He found himself drawn to Griffin’s material in complicated ways. Smithsonian Magazine reported that Griffin himself later “curtailed” his speaking engagements on the book, saying it was “absurd for a white man to presume to speak for Black people when they have superlative voices of their own.”Ĭhicago-based artist Monty Cole has one of those voices. Some modern readers have called it patronizing, others tone-deaf. He chronicled his experiences in a journal, published two years later to considerable acclaim as “Black Like Me.”īut the book has fallen out of favor. Assisted by a physician, Griffin temporarily darkened his skin, to the point friends no longer recognized him and strangers assumed he was Black. Journalist John Howard Griffin went undercover for six weeks in 1959 - posing as a Black man in the Deep South. ![]()
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