Byline: Ray Sprigle; 1948-08-09; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; pages 1
Report: "I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Tags: african american, deep south, posed as, undercover
Article LinksFor 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.
Description:The first article in Sprigle's series focuses on his travel methods, lack of detection, and reliance on a "guide" to navigate the African American communities in the south.
Rights: Access to online material.
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