John Howard Griffin :: Biography Biographies

John Howard Griffin The black man in the Deep mho of America was greatly despised during the 1950s. The world that the Negroes lived in was not the same as tweeds in their society. In this book, John Howard Griffin Sacrifices his life as a middle-class white man and becomes a dirt poor Negro, trying to survive in the South. He simply did all of this in order to suffer out the truth about what it is unfeignedly and truly like to be a Negro in the South during the 1950s.John Howard Griffin is a white journalist with a wife and three children. He began his pop of being a Negro, while he was reading a chart about self-annihilation rates. This chart displayed that the Southern Negro man had a rapidly increasing rate of suicide, because they could not see a reason to go on as the second class citizens that they had become due to their skin color. The whites thought that the Negroes had it made since they had given them so much during reconstruction. Griffin realized that the o nly way to really see the truth about what the Negroes had to endure from day to day was to become a Negro himself.While Griffin was expecting prejudices against himself as a Negro, he went into his project with an open mind trying to discover the truth. He took note of all the prejudices of whites against and took in consideration any acts of kindness. Therefore Griffins journal was aboveboard and unbiased.Griffins main goal in writing this journal was to break the gap between blacks and whites. He was not trying to totally bump whites, but aware them of their injustices towards the Negroes. The fact that he wrote his whole adventure as a journal clearly shows his intentions. He went into the world of the second class Negro, wrote a straight out account of every event that happened by writing a journal. Then the reader saw what his experience was like and believed it more so since it was in a journal setup instead of a story setup. The entire approach of Griffins research was ingenious, very creative, and even a bit daring. Not many people would like to experience that drastic change of lifestyle. However it was a very efficient way of discovering precisely what it was like to be a black man in the 1950s.