Black like Me By: John Howard Griffin by Taina

Black like Me By: John Howard Griffin by Taina - February 2015 Scholarship Essay

Based on a true story, 'Black like Me' is a story about John Griffin's experience as a struggling African American during 1859. Griffin was an American white man that shaved his head, used drugs, and used ultraviolet light to darken his skin to make him appear as an African American traveling for six week through Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia. During 1859 there was a law called the Jim Crow laws. The Jim Crow laws were racial segregation laws enacted after the Reconstruction period in Southern United States. This law was passed in the South giving the South the nickname, Jim Crow South. The title of the book was inspired by the last line of Langston Hughes poem "Dream Variation", another great author that had experienced the torment of segregation in the South.

In this book, Griffin spoke of the cruelty, insults, and racial slurs that were targeted by him because of his skin color. There was even threats, made by the Ku Klux Klan, because of his scheme of acting as a colored man. He also spoke of the living arrangements and the denial access of "white areas". I recommend this book for every high school students before graduation because of the knowledge they will gain. We as high school students have learned about segregation and the "equal but separate" doctrine that Congress used as an excuse as to not breach the fourteenth amendment, which states that "...equal protection under the law to all citizens, and other federal civil rights law." We have read poems by Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou but we have never read something that actually went into details on how bad the South was during this time period.

This book is a learning experience for everyone and it is also something to enjoy. Another reason that I recommend this book is because it will teach us high school students to not judge by the color of our skins and discriminate from each other. We have to face the fact that what happen in 1859 happened and to not repeat the same tragic history and encourage one another as we step into the life of adulthood to become more like our civil rights heroes.