Dutch Uncle
* Tertia Optio * Defend the Constitution
"June 16 marks the 100th anniversary of Griffin’s birth in Dallas." Back in the day, John Howard Griffin's 1960 book "Black Like Me" was on all the high school reading lists in both Kansas and Colorado.
The link is to a Texas power company magazine which has a few stories, 2-3 pages of recipes and a one-page historical item. This month they covered Griffin. It's interesting to me that a book from 60 years ago contains subject matter that is topical across the nation.
https://www.texascooppower.com/texas-stories/history/an-alternate-reality
...In an epilogue for a later printing of Black Like Me, Griffin wrote, “I learned within a very few hours that no one was judging me by my qualities as a human individual and everyone was judging me by my pigment.” Motivated by that injustice, he gave hundreds of lectures and befriended civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr.
Griffin received death threats and was hanged in effigy in Texas, causing him to move his family to Mexico for nine months. He eventually cut back on his speaking, saying he found it absurd to presume to speak for black people when there were superlative black voices to do so.
Griffin developed diabetes and died in 1980 at age 60. His friend Robert Bonazzi, who later married Elizabeth, wrote several books based on Griffin’s journals. “He felt like he had an effect with his efforts, certainly back then,” Bonazzi says from his home in Austin. “Not too many white men would take on a black look and venture out into the world. It was brave and reckless, but he thought it was time for a white man to experience what a black man did, and there was only one way to do that.”...
The link is to a Texas power company magazine which has a few stories, 2-3 pages of recipes and a one-page historical item. This month they covered Griffin. It's interesting to me that a book from 60 years ago contains subject matter that is topical across the nation.
https://www.texascooppower.com/texas-stories/history/an-alternate-reality
...In an epilogue for a later printing of Black Like Me, Griffin wrote, “I learned within a very few hours that no one was judging me by my qualities as a human individual and everyone was judging me by my pigment.” Motivated by that injustice, he gave hundreds of lectures and befriended civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr.
Griffin received death threats and was hanged in effigy in Texas, causing him to move his family to Mexico for nine months. He eventually cut back on his speaking, saying he found it absurd to presume to speak for black people when there were superlative black voices to do so.
Griffin developed diabetes and died in 1980 at age 60. His friend Robert Bonazzi, who later married Elizabeth, wrote several books based on Griffin’s journals. “He felt like he had an effect with his efforts, certainly back then,” Bonazzi says from his home in Austin. “Not too many white men would take on a black look and venture out into the world. It was brave and reckless, but he thought it was time for a white man to experience what a black man did, and there was only one way to do that.”...