"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
I-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
'I Traveled, Ate, Black'
1948-08-09
For four endless, crawling weeks I was a Negro in the Deep South. I ate, slept, traveled, lived Black. I lodged in Negro households. I ate in Negro restaurants. I slept in Negro hotels and lodging houses. I crept through the back and side doors of railroad stations. I traveled Jim Crow in buses and trains and street cars and taxicabs. Along with 10,000,000 Negroes I endured the discrimination and oppression and cruelty of the iniquitous Jim Crow system. It was a strange, new-and for me, uncharted world that I entered when, in a Jim Crow railroad coach, we rumbled across the Potomac out of Washington. It was a world of which I had no remote conception, despite scores of trips through the South. The world I had known in the South was white. Now I was black and the world I was to know was as bewildering as if I had been dropped down on the moon. The towers and turrets of the great cities of the Southland, painted against the falling night, as we rolled along the highways, represented a civilization and an economy completely alien to me and the rest of the black millions in the South.
II-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Acquiring a Negro Appearance
1948-08-10
This thing of suddenly switching races after more than half a century of life as a white man has its problems and difficulties. Remember all those romances you’ve read in which the hero is going to turn Hindu, or Arab or one or the other of the darker races. Remember how almost invariably he goes to "an old woman" in tile nearby village and she gives him a lotion that turns him dark for weeks or months. Well, my trouble, I guess, was that I couldn’t seem to find one of those old women. And in more than six months of searching I couldn’t find any lotion or liquid that would turn a white hide brown or black and still be impervious to perspiration, soap and water and the ravages of ordinary wear and tear. Wait a bit though. Let me modify that last statement. Both Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh and a Long Island chemist I consulted did come up with a permanent stain. Both recommended any one of a series of phenol compounds. But they thought it only fair to warn me that there was one little drawback. It seems that if you covered yourself thoroughly with one of them you’d find yourself thoroughly dead in from 15 minutes to 15 days, depending upon your resistance. I thanked them kindly for their assistance.
IIII-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Going South by Jim Crow Car
1948-08-11
I quit being white, and free, and an American citizen when I climbed aboard that Jim Crow coach in Washington Union station. From then on, until I came up out of the South four weeks later, I was black, and in bondage not quite slavery but not quite freedom, either. My rights of citizenship ran only as far as the nearest white man said they did. Not that that Jim Crow coach was particularly bad-when regarded solely as a railroad coach. In fact, it was surprisingly good. The reclining seats were comfortable. The wash room was really luxurious compared with those in some of the coaches I ride around home. Seats were numbered and reserved. There was no crowding. But-even excellent accommodations are not going to reconcile intelligent, cultured Negroes to Jim Crow. My companion and I were having a little difficulty in finding the black section of the train. He encountered the daughter of an old friend of his, a handsomely-dressed, quite beautiful Negro girl, and asked where the Jim Crow coaches were. "There’s the things we’ll ride in," she said with a contemptuous wave toward the two pieces of Jim Crow rolling stock. It developed that she was a school teacher from Harlem on her way home to visit her aged mother. (Weeks later we passed through the sunbaked, dusty, sprawling little town where the mother lived. There was a vast difference between that unkempt town and the fashionable, cultured-appearing girl from Harlem with upswept hair-do and latest doo-dads in the way of costume.)
IV-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A Discussion in a Pleasant Negro Home
1948-08-12
We’re at breakfast in this pleasant, comfortable, Negro home. One of the daughters is home on a visit from Tennessee where she and her husband are university instructors. The conversation drifts, as it inevitably will wherever and whenever Negroes gather, to the all-overshadowing race problem. Her 5-year-old son is at the table too. Whenever she uses the word "white," she spells it out w-h-i-t-e. She spells N-e-g-r-o too. So far, she hopes, her youngster doesn’t know the difference between Negro and white. He probably doesn’t because some of his relatives are as white in color as any white man and others range all the way to deep black. Those spelled-out words highlight another and vitally important problem of the intelligent Negro. When do you begin teaching your child how he is to live as a Negro? When do you begin teaching him the difference between black and white -- not as colors but as races? When do you begin teaching him how to live under the iron rule of a master race that regards him as an inferior breed? When do you begin teaching him that for him, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are scraps of paper?
V-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A Woman Tells How Her Husband Died
1948-08-13
She is worn and aged and bent beyond her time. Nearly a quarter of a century behind a plow and a mule under blazing Georgia suns have done that to her. In a haze of dull despair, this broken, hopeless Negro farm woman sits in this little parlor in Black Atlanta and tells her tale of murder. "When the white folks gave him back to me he was in his coffin. I held his head in my hands when I kissed him. And I felt the broken pieces of bone under the skin. It was just like a sackful of little pieces of bone. "I put my arms around him for one last time as he lay there. All down one side of him there were no ribs -- just pieces that moved when I held him."
VII-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
What It Means to Be a Share-Cropper
1948-08-16
Under a blazing Georgia sun we begin our journey of 3,400 miles through the black South. Cotton is greening the blood-red soil of the endless fields. It’s cotton chopping time, when the cotton plants must be thinned out. Family by family the Negro share-croppers are in the fields, children of seven or eight and grandmothers and grandfathers who totter when they walk but still are able to swing a hoe. Not all of the women are in the fields, though. This is Monday, wash day in the South as in the North. All along the highway and the little side roads the iron kettles are steaming over fires in the yards — dirty clothes boiling clean. We stop off for a drink of water and a bite of corn pone in the kitchen of Hannah Ingram. Hannah is one of the hundreds of Negro homesteaders on the Flint River project In Macon county. It’s a tract of some 12,000 acres bought by the federal government eight years ago and divided into tracts running from 50 to 200 acres. These were parcelled out to Negro share-croppers who could make a small down payment. They’ve got 40 years to pay out.
VI-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Beginning a Trip Into The Rack Country
1948-08-16
Under a blazing Georgia sun we begin our journey of 3,400 miles through the black South. Cotton is greening the blood-red soil of the endless fields. It’s cotton chopping time, when the cotton plants must be thinned out. Family by family the Negro share-croppers are in the fields, children of seven or eight and grandmothers and grandfathers who totter when they walk but still are able to swing a hoe. Not all of the women are in the fields, though. This is Monday, wash day in the South as in the North. All along the highway and the little side roads the iron kettles are steaming over fires in the yards — dirty clothes boiling clean. We stop off for a drink of water and a bite of corn pone in the kitchen of Hannah Ingram. Hannah is one of the hundreds of Negro homesteaders on the Flint River project In Macon county. It’s a tract of some 12,000 acres bought by the federal government eight years ago and divided into tracts running from 50 to 200 acres. These were parcelled out to Negro share-croppers who could make a small down payment. They’ve got 40 years to pay out.
VIII-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Two Negroes Who Have Earned Their Way
1948-08-17
This is a "tough" town in a "tough" county. We break our journey to get a couple of bottles of beer in the picturesque juke joint that Jared Buford runs down here in the Negro section for colored folk. And again, "Jared Buford" is about as far away from his real name as could well be. Jared just took over this little beer place a few months ago. He bought it out of the profits he made on his 100 rented acres outside of town. Jared himself is a tall, powerful Negro who moves like a great cat. He was three years in the Army, two of them overseas. There’s one thing that Jared Buford would like to do. He’d like to vote. Just once. He’s never voted and he’s never tried to vote. And he makes it plain that as long as he lives in this county he’ll never even try to vote. "No," he explains, "nobody would ‘hurt’ a Negro who tried to register. They’d just pay you no never mind. You go up to the courthouse and tell the white folks you want to register. That’d be the end of it. Nobody would give you anything to register with. Come closing time you’d just have to go home."
IX-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Jim-Crow Is Kicked In the Pants
1948-08-18
Not since my boyhood days in the homes of my Pennsylvania Dutch relatives have I sat down to a table loaded as this one is. Great platters of fried chicken - and listen, it’s Pennsylvania Dutch fried chicken, the gooey kind - not that abomination known as southern fried chicken that I’ve been getting for the past two weeks. And biscuits - light, fluffy and piping hot. And here’s a new wrinkle. The biscuits are baked in small pans - in the oven at a time. So when you call for a fresh one it’s right out of the oven. Three or four kinds of jam; big gobs of country butter. And great pitchers of real buttermilk - what’s left after you churn country butter - the first I’ve tasted in 20 years. This 65 acres a few miles outside Chickamauga, Ga., is another little oasis in the desert of discrimination and injustice that is the black South. It is the farm of C. D. Haslerig, who has carved out a way of life for himself and his children on this fertile North Georgia farm. The rest of our group attends a district meeting of a Negro fraternal order. I am here to eat.
X-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A Soldier Who Came Home to Die
1948-08-19
When they call the roll of Americans who died to make men free, add to that heroic list the name of Private Macy Yost Snipes, black man, Georgia, U. S. A. Death missed him on a dozen bloody battlefields overseas, where he served his country well. He came home to die in the littered door-yard of his boyhood home because he thought that freedom was for all Americans, and tried to prove it. It wasn’t that he didn’t get fair warning. He knew what to expect. And he got just that. Early in July the white folks passed the warning through the Negro countryside around the little sun-warped country hamlet of Rupert, in Taylor county, Georgia. It was brief and to the point. The first Negro to vote in Rupert would be killed, ran the word.
XI-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A Most Successful Negro Farmer
1948-08-20
Given the right kind of white neighbors, the right kind of a community, the right kind of land and a terrific capacity for hard work, once in a while a Negro can do pretty well for himself in the deep South. Witness David E. Jackson down here on the outskirts of Adel Ga., in Cook county. But remember, too, that Dave is one in a million. So far as I know he’s one in ten million. Dave Jackson owns and farms 1,000 acres of some of the best land in Georgia. He owns two blocks of business property in Adel, and a score of houses. He’s a stockholder in the newly formed bank. He lives in a 10-room modern home. He runs four tractors and four big trailer trucks. He operates two big produce warehouses in Adel. He buys and sells 100,000 bushels of corn every year in addition to the thousands of bushels he raises. He ships corn as far north as Tennessee and North Carolina. Last year he shipped 15 carloads of watermelons and he can’t recall how many trailer truck loads of early vegetables. He raises cotton and tobacco and hogs, 500 hogs last year, 400 this year.
XII-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Negro Doctors Treat White Patients
1948-08-21
Right here this Jim Crow thing gets to the point where it’s just plain silly - if a thing so replete with heartbreak and tragedy can ever be properly called silly. Here we sit in the waiting room of Dr. - well let’s say Dr. Bradford Gordon. He’s got that kind of a New England sounding name but why mention it here, when it might be the cause of getting him Kluxed. The room is filling up after the noon hour, white farmers in from the country with their wives and youngsters to get their teeth "fixed up." Other, better-dressed whites, men and women, plainly city dwellers. And a handful of Negro mothers with their children. No segregation here. When Dr. Gordon appears he proves to be very, very black. He Is a towering figure of a man, graduate of a famous northern university and a star on its football team. The man seems to beam with kindliness and courtesy. If he isn’t a gentleman, I never saw one. We chat a while.
XIII-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A Visit to a Jim Crow School
1948-08-23
Here on the outskirts of the pleasant, thriving little Georgia town of Bluffton in Clay county I go to school again. And what a school! This dilapidated, sagging old shack, leaning and lop-sided as its makeshift foundations give way, is the lordly white’s conception of a schoolhouse for Negroes. This leaking old wreck of a shanty must be nearly half a century old. The warped old clapboards are falling off. Holes bigger than your hand give permanent cross-ventilation. There are no desks, no seats but rude benches. Two rough tables serve as desks. A few dog-eared school books are scattered on the tables. A "blackboard,"’ apparently home made, just a sheet of cardboard about two by three feet, is nailed to the bare studding. Only redeeming feature of this thing called a school is the teacher. Tall and spare, gentle and soft spoken, earnest and intelligent, she reminds you of a typical New England school-marm with her sharp aquiline features - except for a deeper sun tan than one could ever get on a beach.
XIV-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Feudalism Lives on In the Delta
1948-08-24
Black of the rich earth and green of the springing cotton plants stretch from horizon to horizon. This is the fabulous Mississippi Delta, last outpost of feudalism in America. Here is land more fertile than any other in the world. Here close to half a million Negroes toil from childhood to the grave in the service of King Cotton, from sunup to sundown if they share-crop, from 6 to 6 if they work by the day. Here are feudal baronies that run from 5,000 to 20,000 acres, where as many as 6,000 sharecropper families, wives and children, parents and grandparents follow the one mule plow and the chopping hoe all their lives. On these tight little Delta principalities "The Man" (the landlord), is the middle justice, the high and the low. Mississippi law stops dead in its tracks at their boundaries. No sheriff, no peace officer takes a man, black or white off these acres until "The Man" tells him he may
XV-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A Marble Monument To Cruelty
1948-08-25
In this little, straggling Negro cemetery, its graves weed-grown, its headstones leaning drunkenly, stands a magnificent sarcophagus of white Alabama marble. It is an astonishing thing to find here on the edge of this Mississippi Delta town of Clarksdale. Quite likely there’s nothing like it all up and down the Delta in either white or Negro cemetery.Within it lie the bodies of a dark woman and her baby, both dead in the hour of the baby’s birth. Proudly, Dr. P. W. Hill, wealthy Negro dentist, shows us through this gleaming mausoleum where his wife and baby lie and where some day he too will rest.In all simplicity he regards it only as his tribute to the ones he loved.
XVI-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The Falsity of "Separate but Equal"
1948-08-26
This thing of bald and unashamed discrimination against little black American citizens in the matter of education can get really brazen. Witness the situation down here in District No.4, Madison county, Miss. What these lordly exemplars of white supremacy have done down here in the Delta country is to use the tax money paid into the county treasury by Negro property owners to build themselves a magnificent school plant at the Negroes’ expense. What the Negroes got out of their tax money and the usual state contribution for school purposes is right here in front of us, hidden away on this back country road, a desert to dust in summer and a morass of mud in winter. This school is new. And that’s all that can be said for it. When the white folks took Negro tax money and built themselves their fine school, they at least built a new school for the Negroes. But not until there was a storm of protest from all over the state - from whites and blacks alike. The white folks of District No. 4 were going to let the little Negro pupils continue to pick up what education they could in their two schools, one in a church and the other in a lodge room.
XVII-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Atlantic Ocean for White Folks Only
1948-08-27
For three hot and dusty weeks and 3,000 hot and dusty miles I’ve been looking forward to Brunswick and Savannah; the broad white beaches of the Georgia coast and a couple days of ocean swimming. All right - here are Savannah and Brunswick. Here are the broad white beaches. Here is the wide blue Atlantic Ocean. But there’ll be no sea bathing for me. I’ve dragged those swim trunks all these miles for nothing. And why? Because this is a strictly Jim Crow ocean and I’m black. Along all the hundred miles of Georgia’s coast line with its scores of beautiful island and shore beaches, there’s not a single foot where a Negro can stick a toe in salt water. North and south, South Carolina and Florida have public and private beaches reserved for us black people. Not Georgia. Georgia is going to keep her share of the Atlantic pure and undefiled - and lily white.
XVIII-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A Leaf out of the Jim Crow Book
1948-08-28
Here and there and now and then in the deep South you’ll find a Negro with a shrewd Yankee instinct for business, who is smart enough to turn the Jim Crow obsession of the southerner to his own substantial profit. And quite frequently that profit stems not from his own oppressed people, but from the lordly white man. I know at least one Negro who is an operator in a big way in downtown Atlanta business property. He works through a dependable white lawyer and his name rarely if ever appears in a transaction. Usually you’ll find Negro real estate operators dealing in white occupied property have to work that way. But in one up and coming Georgia city we found a Negro real estate man who works it exactly in reverse. He’s one of the richest men, black or white, in his county. We stopped over with him one night. Nowhere but in the South with its inviolable Jim Crow tradition could you hear a success story like this one.
XIX-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Atlanta Is the Black Capital of U.S.
1948-08-30
Atlanta Negroes like to boast that their town is the "Black Capital of America." They react with horror and indignation to outrages against Negroes in the smaller towns of the South. They contribute thousands to defense funds to protect the rights of their people or avenge their wanton murder. For hours they’d sit and assure me that "It can’t happen here." But the bloody record of Negro killings in their own town proves them wrong. Reluctantly they’ll finally admit it. That’s another thing I’ll never understand - the intense local patriotism of the Southern Negro. If he lives in Atlanta, then Atlanta’s the finest town in the world. And Georgia is the greatest state. He wouldn’t live anywhere else. And the Mississippi Negro will pound the tale and tell him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. As a temporary black man I’ll tell the world right now that there isn’t a square foot of the South that I like and if I were permanently black, if you ever caught me south of the Smith and Wesson line you could shoot me. But if you’re black it isn’t too hard to get yourself thoroughly killed by a white cop, or a street car motorman or just a plain everyday gun totin’ citizen, in this "liberal" town of Atlanta.
XX-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Does the Negro Hate The White Man?
1948-08-31
Strangely enough, the Negro in the South doesn’t hate the white man. It could well be that my four weeks as a Negro in the deep South falls grievously short in equipping me as an authority on the subject. But I’ll still stand on my opinion. Remember that I talked at length with the real leaders of the Negro not all of them by any means - but with scores of them in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. They are the men on the firing line who are battling for Negro rights and Negro progress where it’s dangerous to do it. They are the local heads of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, ministers, business men, college professors, doctors, lawyers, school teachers, Negro plantation owners, men of substance and influence in their own communities among both whites and blacks. I wasn’t a white man interviewing them, remember. I was a Negro from the North, a friend of Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP. I was a guest in their homes. We sat for hours over their dinner tables. I slept in their guest rooms. We were just a group of Negroes talking things over.
XXI-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
What Does the Negro Really Want?
1948-09-01
All my life I’ve regarded Eliza’s stunt of crossing the Ohio on the floating ice floes, with bloodhounds baying at her heels, as a pretty heroic adventure. Not any more. The night I came up out of the deep South in a Jim Crow bus, I’d have been glad to take a chance crossing on the ice if anything had happened to stall our jolting chariot on the Kentucky shore. And there’d have been no need of any bloodhounds to put me into high gear. We rolled out of Kentucky across that old Ohio River bridge into Cincinnati - into safety and freedom and peace. Again I was free with all the rights of an American citizen. Again I was no, not white. Not yet. It wasn’t that easy. Down South my friends had done too good a job of making me into a Negro. For many days I’d been looking forward to an elaborate meal in a luxurious restaurant with fancy food and prices and service and attention. I found one. And then -take it or leave it-I didn’t go in. I found a little lunch counter and ate there.
Introduction
Sprigle's secret journey
1998-08-09
CHICKAMAUGA, Ga. -- No one in the small country church 50 years ago had any reason to suspect that their visitor was not who he said he was. It was true that James R. Crawford - the light-skinned Negro man from Pittsburgh - was a complete stranger. And a Northerner. But Crawford had come to their black fraternal group's district meeting and picnic with C.D. Haslerig, who was a prosperous dairy farmer and one of the leading black citizens in the rural northern Georgia cotton mill town.