Before Black Like Me: Robert Gilbert Wells and Mr. Jones: Passing as Black

Abstract

Furor erupted in the South in the early 1960s when John Howard Griffin published Black Like Me, his moving account of darkening his skin and hair in order to “pass” as an African-American man in the segregated South. His book detailed the discrimination and hardship he endured as he traveled on buses, hitchhiked, and struggled to find food and shelter as in the Deep South. After his book’s 1961publication,Griffithwashanged in effigy, had a cross burned in front of his house, and eventually temporarily left the country.Ultimately,BlackLikeMebecameabestseller,wentthoughnumerouseditions, and remains in print today. The book forced white America to see inside the AfricanAmerican experience and was certainly a factor in influencing desegregation policies. But long before Black Like Me, Robert Gilbert Wells, an African-American writer, wrote his own story in 1905 of a white man who changes his color, travels as a black man, and is transformed by the experience. The event is pivotal to the book. Wells’ book, Anthropology Applied to the American White Man and Negro ,w as published by Wells’ own printing firm (Wells & Company, Book Concern, 1905 )i n the predominantly African American and racially integrated township of Buxton, Iowa. 1