30 days a black man : the forgotten story that exposed the Jim Crow south
(CD)

Compact discs.

Read by Grover Gardner.

In 1948, most white people in the North had no idea how unjust life was for the ten million African Americans living in the South. But that suddenly changed after Ray Sprigle, a white journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a black man in the Jim Crow South.Escorted through the Souths parallel black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a historic black civil rights pioneer from Atlanta, Sprigle met with sharecroppers, local black leaders, and families of lynching victims. He visited ramshackle black schools and slept at the homes of prosperous black farmers and doctors.The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporters series was syndicated coast to coast in white newspapers and carried into the South only by the Pittsburgh Courier, the countrys leading black paper. His vivid descriptions and undisguised outrage at "the iniquitous Jim Crow system" shocked the North, enraged the South, and ignited the first national debate in the media about ending Americas system of apartheid.Six years before Brown v. Board of Education, seven years before the murder of Emmett Till, and thirteen years before John Howard Griffins similar experiment became the bestseller Black Like Me, Sprigles intrepid journalism blasted into the American consciousness the grim reality of black lives in the South.