30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South
Ray Sprigle, Bill SteigerwaldEscorted through the South’s parallel black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a historic black civil rights pioneer from Atlanta, Sprigle met with sharecroppers, local black leaders, & families of lynching victims. He visited ramshackle black schools & slept at the homes of prosperous black farmers & doctors.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter’s series was syndicated coast to coast in white newspapers & carried into the South only by the Pittsburgh Courier, the country’s leading black paper. His vivid descriptions & undisguised outrage at "the iniquitous Jim Crow system" shocked the North, enraged the South, & ignited the first national debate in the media about ending America’s system of apartheid.
Six years before Brown v. Board of Education, seven years before the murder of Emmett Till, & thirteen years before John Howard Griffin’s similar experiment became the bestseller Black Like Me, Sprigle’s intrepid journalism blasted into the American consciousness the grim reality of black lives in the South.
Author Bill Steigerwald elevates Sprigle’s groundbreaking exposé to its rightful place among the seminal events of the early Civil Rights movement.