XVIII-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A Leaf out of the Jim Crow Book

Byline: Ray Sprigle; 1948-08-28; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; pages 1

Report: "I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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 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.  

Description:Sprigle finds an African American man who has made substantial wealth by exploiting the bigotry of the Jim Crow south.

Rights: Access to online material.

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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article titled, "I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days." Written by Ray Sprigle as part of a series.