John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin (June 16, 1920 – September 9, 1980) was an American journalist and author from Texas who wrote about and championed racial equality. He is best known for his 1959 project to temporarily pass as a black man and journey through the Deep South to see life and segregation from the other side of the color line first-hand. He first published a series of articles on his experience in Sepia magazine, which had underwritten the project, then later published an expanded account in book form under the title Black Like Me (1961). 

This was later adapted into a 1964 film of the same name. A 50th-anniversary edition of the book was published in 2011 by Wings Press. Griffin was born in 1920 in Dallas, Texas, to John Walter Griffin and Lena May Young. His mother was a classical pianist, and Griffin acquired his love of music from her. Awarded a musical scholarship, he went to France to study French language and literature at the University of Poitiers and medicine at the École de Médecine. At 19, he joined the French Resistance as a medic, working at the Atlantic seaport of Saint-Nazaire, where he helped smuggle Austrian Jews to safety and freedom in England.

Griffin returned to the United States and enlisted, serving 39 months in the United States Army Air Forces stationed in the South Pacific, during which he was decorated for bravery. He spent 1943–44 as the only European-American in Nuni, one of the Solomon Islands, where he was assigned to study the local culture. He had a bout with spinal malaria that left him temporarily paraplegic. During this year, Griffin married an island woman. In 1946 he went slowly blind, the after-effect of a severe concussion that he had received from a Japanese bomb. 

He would remain blind until inexplicably regaining his sight in 1957. He returned home to Texas without his wife and converted to Catholicism in 1952, becoming a Lay Carmelite. He taught piano. He gained dispensation from the Vatican for a second marriage. He married one of his students, Elizabeth Ann Holland, and they had four children. In 1952, he published his first novel, The Devil Rides Outside, a mystery set in a monastery in postwar France, where a young American composer goes to study Gregorian chant.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Griffin wrote a number of essays about his loss of sight and his life, followed by his spontaneous return to sight in 1957. At that point, he began to develop as a photographer. He published Nuni (1956), a semi-autobiographical novel drawing from his year "marooned" in the Solomon Islands. It shows his developing interest in ethnography. He conducted a kind of social study in his 1959 project, resulting in his book Black Like Me (1961).