A wonderful book, from a remarkable man. Very few people could have pulled this out, and even fewer would have survived it. John Griffin not only survived, but became a better man on account of his research.
Quotes:
We no longer have time to atomize principles and beg the question. We fill too many gutters while we argue unimportant points and confuse issues.
How else except by becoming a Negro could a white man hope to learn the truth?
I learned a strange thing - that in a jumble of unintelligible talk, the word “nigger” leaps out with electric clarity. Yo u always hear it and always it stings.
“You’ve got to plan ahead now,” he said. “You can’t do like you used to when you were a white man.
After a while Joe took a pocket Bible from the green serge army shirt he wore and began reading the Psalms to himself.
“Blessed St. Jude,” I heard myself whisper, “send the bastard away,” and I wondered from what source within me the prayer had spontaneously sprung.
The whites seemed far away, out there in their parts of the city. The distance between them and me was far more than the miles that physically separated us. It was an area of unknowing. I wondered if it could really be bridged.
“We need a conversion of morals,” the elderly man said. “Not just superficially, but profoundly. And in both races. We need a great saint - some enlightened common sense.
The Negro often dreams of things separated from him only by a door, knowing that he is forever cut off from experiencing them.
The Negro learns this silent language fluently. He knows by the white man’s look of disapproval and petulance that he is being told to get on his way, that he is “stepping out of line.”
I had grown so accustomed to being a Negro, to being shown contempt, that I could not rid myself of the cautions. I was embarrassed to ride in the front seat of the car with a white man, especially on our way to his home. It was breaking the “Southern rule” somehow.
What did we fear? I could not say exactly. It was unlikely the Klan would come riding down on us. We merely fell into the fear that hangs over the state, a nameless and awful thing. It reminded me of the nagging, focusless terror we felt in Europe when Hitler began his marches, the terror of talking with Jews (and our deep shame of it).
It is perhaps the most incredible collection of what East calls “assdom” in the South. It shows that the most obscene figures are not the ignorant ranting racists, but the legal minds who front for them, who “invent” for them the legislative proposals and the propaganda bulletins.
He saw the Negro as a different species. He saw me as something akin to an animal in that he felt no need to maintain his sense of human dignity, though certainly he would have denied this.
“When you force humans into a subhuman mode of existence, this always happens. Deprive a man of any contact with the pleasures of the spirit and he’ll fall completely into those of the flesh.”
I could only conclude that his attitude came from an overwhelming love for his child, so profound it spilled over to all humanity. I knew that he was totally unaware of its ability to cure men; of the blessing it could be to someone like me after having been exhausted and scraped raw in my heart by others this rainy Alabama night.
We spoke of the whites. “They’re God’s children, just like us,” he said. “Even if they don’t act very godlike anymore. God tells us straight - we’ve got to love them, no ifs, ands, and buts about it. Why, if we hated them, we’d be sunk down to their level. There’s plenty of us doing just that, too.”
“When we stop loving them, that’s when they win.”
It was thrown in my face. I saw it not as a white man and not as a Negro, but as a human parent. Their children resembled mine in all ways except the superficial one of skin color, as indeed they resembled all children of all humans. Ye t this accident, this least important of all qualities, the skin pigment, marked them for inferior status.
In Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, I encountered a new atmosphere. The Negro’s feeling of utter hopelessness is here replaced by a determined spirit of passive resistance. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’ s influence, like an echo of Gandhi’s, prevails. Nonviolent and prayerful resistance to discrimination is the keynote.
The monk laughed. “Didn’t Shakespeare say something about ‘every fool in error can find a passage of Scripture to back him up’? He knew his religious bigots.”
The car soon arrived, with children waving and shouting from the windows. I felt their arms around my neck, their hugs and the marvelous jubilation of reunion. And in the midst of it, the picture of the prejudice and bigotry from which I had just come flashed into my mind, and I heard myself mutter: “My God, how can men do it when there are things like this in the world?”
If we could not accept our somewhat different practice of racist suppression of black Americans, how could we ever hope to correct it? Our experience with the Nazis had shown one thing: where racism is practiced, it damages the whole community, not just the victim group.
I learned within a very few hours that no one was judging me by my qualities as a human individual and everyone was judging me by my pigment. As soon as white men or women saw me, they automatically assumed I possessed a whole set of false characteristics (false not only to me but to all black men). They could not see me or any other black man as a human individual because they buried us under the garbage of their stereotyped view of us.
Heaped on top of the economic reprisals and the dangers of physical reprisal was perhaps the most damaging reprisal of all - the deliberate character assassination that sprang into play the moment a man suggested that there ought to be equality among citizens, and this in a land where we claim equality as a first principle. How easy it was to destroy a man’s good name and reputation by suggesting he was in some way subversive or by calling him a communist.
It got so bad that Lillian Smith wrote: “It’s high time we stopped giving the communists credit for every decent, brave, considerate act” white men might show in regard to black men.
racism always hides under a respectable guise - usually the guise of patriotism and religion
In spite of everything, however, those days of the early and mid-sixties were full of hope.
There are thousands of kinds of injustice but there is only one kind of justice - equal justice for all. To call for a little more justice, or a moderately gradual sort of justice, is to call for no justice. That is a simple truth.
Having recognized the depths of my own prejudices when I first saw my black face in the mirror, I was grateful to discover that within a week as a black man the old wounds were healed and all the emotional prejudice was gone.
he answered to a higher will that demanded merciful acts in a merciless world.
Look around, sisters and brothers, the Global Village arrived while we were out to lunch or napping through re-runs of starving children on the death channel. Look inward to the Great Spirit and know that the reality of human nature has been—and will always be—universal. Black Like Me means Human Like Us.
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