One of the first lessons is not to drink water during the day, since 'colored' restrooms are few and far between. He undertakes his journey as a black man in order to write about minority issues from the inside, as a subjective participant rather than just an objective observer.Īfter darkening his skin with help from a cooperative dermatologist, Horton goes to New Orleans and befriends an African-American man who runs a shoeshine stand, enlisting his advice on how to talk, behave, and even think in ways that won't give away his white identity. Horton agrees with Martin Luther King that what counts is not the shade of one's complexion but the content of one's character.

He returned from wartime military service with injuries that badly impaired his vision for several years his sight came back after a while, but temporary blindness reinforced his awareness that physical traits are literally skin deep. As a native of Texas, he grew up surrounded by everyday racism that he eventually overcame and renounced. His purpose is not just to observe but actually to live through the everyday degradation, oppression, and humiliation suffered by black people in the Jim Crow era, then document his experiences so others can understand them better and work for desperately needed change.Ĭhronicling this unusual odyssey through a flashback structure and a semi-documentary visual style, writer-director Carl Lerner and co-screenwriter Gerda Lerner introduce Horton as a dark-skinned man already pursuing his goal, then go back in time to reveal facts about his background and his reasons for undertaking his difficult and often dangerous odyssey.

Played by James Whitmore and renamed John Finley Horton for the movie adaptation, he uses a combination of drugs, sunlamps, and makeup to darken his white complexion and then travels through the South posing as an African-American drifter on the lookout for cheap lodgings and low-wage jobs. Share Black Like Me (1964), based on the book of that title by John Howard Griffin, tells the unlikely tale of a bold, flawed, and enduringly controversial experiment carried out by a journalist whose lack of training in social science was balanced by deep curiosity and a profound sense of indignation over some of the ugliest aspects of 20th-century American society.

Black like me by john howard griffin