John Howard Griffin Chapter Summary

This book takes place in the late-1950’s. John Howard Griffin was a normal white man living in Mansfield, Texas. But inside, he wasn’t normal compared to other whites during those times. Griffin had many questions about racial injustice that he wish could be answered. But a normal white man couldn’t ask a black man about how he lives because it was abnormal for a white man to be talking to the “inferior” black man. So, a white man wouldn’t be able to step inside of the shoes of a black man. Or could he? Griffin decided that he wanted to find the answers to his questions one way or another. He turns to his old friend George Levitan, the owner of Sepia, a Negro magazine. George helped Griffin with the funding he needed for this experience in return for an article of it. Griffin begins to tell the story of how he literally went to the “dark side”.

In this book, Griffin tells the readers how he took a

At the end of the book, Griffin stops taking the medication and he returns to his normal skin tone. He returns home to his family and he starts to write down his article about his experience. He starts to get phone calls from interviewers and he starts to do interviews. Many white people try to call his phone and threaten him. People called and threatened his wife. The white people even took it far enough to hang a dummy, painted half black and half white and put Griffin's name on it for everyone to see. This caused Griffin and his whole family to move to Mexico. This book really opened my eyes to racial segregation. I never knew that a white man would risk his life just to give words to black people who couldn’t express what they were going through in The South. All though he was treated rudely and disrespectfully he still continued to go on with the experiment. His work exposed how bad the race tensions really