Browse Primary Sources
XXI-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 1948-09-01
XX-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 1948-08-31
XIX-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 1948-08-30
XVIII-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 1948-08-28
XVII-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 1948-08-27
XIII-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 1948-08-23
X-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 1948-08-19
IX-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 1948-08-18
VIII-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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."
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 1948-08-17