About this item
In 1948 most white people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for the 10 million African Americans living in the South. But that suddenly changed after Ray Sprigle, a famous white journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a black man in the Jim Crow South.Escorted through the South's 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 reporter's series was syndicated coast to coast in white newspapers and carried into the South only by the Pittsburgh Courier, the country's 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 America's 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 Griffin's similar experiment became the bestseller Black Like Me, Sprigle's intrepid journalism blasted into the American consciousness the grim reality of black lives in the South.Author Bill Steigerwald elevates Sprigle's groundbreaking expos to its rightful place among the seminal events of the early Civil Rights movement.
About the Author
Bill Steigerwald is a veteran journalist from Pittsburgh. His new nonfiction book "30 Days a Black Man" tells the amazing but forgotten story about an undercover mission by a Pittsburgh newspaperman into the Jim Crow South in 1948 that shook up the whole country. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle's nationally syndicated series "In the Land of Jim Crow" exposed the iniquities and humiliations suffered by ten million black Americans in the segregated South. It shocked the white people of the North, angered the South and started the first national debate in the media about ending America's legal apartheid. Kirkus Review said "30 Days a Black Man" is "a fascinating account of an anti-Jim Crow muckraking adventure..." that Steigerwald turned "into rollicking, haunting American history." In 2010 Steigerwald retraced John Steinbeck's "Travels With Charley" road trip of 1960 and wrote "Dogging Steinbeck." A travel book that explored Flyover Country and its people, "DS" exposed the many fictions and fibs Steinbeck put into "Charley" and forced its publisher to admit after fifty years that it was a work of fiction, not nonfiction. Before he turned to books, Steigerwald worked as an editor and writer/reporter/columnist for the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s, the Post-Gazette in the 1990s and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in the 2000s. His weekly Q&As with important, newsy and interesting people and libertarian op-ed columns were nationally syndicated for about five years at CagleCartoons.com. His freelance articles, interviews and commentaries have appeared in many of the major newspapers in the USA and in magazines like Reason, Penthouse and Family Circle. He retired from the daily newspaper business in March 2009. He and his wife Trudi live south of Pittsburgh in the woods.
