Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow: The true story of a white newspaperman from Pittsburgh who posed as black man in 1948 and woke up the country to the iniquities of American apartheid

In 1948 most white people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for the 10 million African Americans living in the South. But that suddenly changed after Ray Sprigle, a nationally famous white journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a black man in the Jim Crow South for a month. With the blessing of the NAACP and its dynamic executive secretary Walter White, Sprigle was escorted and protected through the South’s parallel black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a historic black civil rights pioneer and political leader from Atlanta. With Dobbs' guidance and protection, Sprigle pretended to be a light-skinned NAACP field researcher from Pittsburgh. He met with sharecroppers, local black leaders, and families of lynching victims. He visited ramshackle black schools and slept at the homes of prosperous black farmers and doctors.The powerful, vivid, angry and still-shocking series describing "the iniquitous Jim Crow system" that Sprigle wrote for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, reprinted here word for word, was syndicated coast to coast in white newspapers -- but nowhere in the South. It was carried into the Land of Jim Crow only by the Pittsburgh Courier, the country’s largest black newspaper. Sprigle's undercover journalism woke up the white North to the inequality and injustice of Jim Crow, enraged the white South, and ignited the first debate in the national media about ending America’s system of apartheid.Sprigle's pioneering journalism came six years before Brown v. Board of Education, seven years before the murder of Emmett Till, and thirteen years before John Howard Griffin’s similar experiment became the bestseller 'Black Like Me.' What he saw made him ashamed to be an American. What he wrote about the grim, oppressive and unequal reality blacks endured each day under Jim Crow is still powerful today.