John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin was a white American journalist and author from Texas who became one of the most unusual chroniclers of mid-century race relations in the United States. Before Black Like Me, he had already lived a remarkably eventful life: he served as a medic in the French Resistance during World War II, was awarded the Croix de Guerre, and spent a decade blind after sustaining a wartime injury, only to recover his sight years later. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1952, and his moral framework throughout his writing was deeply shaped by his faith and by his commitment to human dignity.

After Black Like Me was published in 1961, Griffin became an active figure in the civil rights movement, lecturing widely, defending his findings, and continuing to write about racial inequality. The death threats he received from white supremacists were severe enough that he relocated his family to Mexico for a time. He returned to the United States and continued working as a journalist and essayist until his death in 1980. Black Like Me remains his most widely read work and is still assigned in classrooms today, both as a window into the segregated South and as a touchstone for ongoing debates about empathy, allyship, and the ethics of telling someone else's story.