30 Days a Black Man

The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South

By: Bill Steigerwald, Juan Williams - foreword

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

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 famous White journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a Black man in the Jim Crow South.

Escorted 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, and families of lynching victims. He visited ramshackle Black schools and slept at the homes of prosperous Black farmers and doctors. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter's series was syndicated coast to coast in White newspapers and carried into the South only by the Pittsburgh Courier, the country's leading Black paper. His vivid descriptions and undisguised outrage at "the iniquitous Jim Crow system" shocked the North, enraged the South, and ignited the first national debate in the media about ending America's system of apartheid.

Six years before Brown v. Board of Education, seven before the murder of Emmett Till, and 13 years before John Howard Griffin's similar experiment became the best seller Black Like Me, Sprigle's intrepid journalism blasted into the American consciousness the grim reality of Black lives in the South.

©2017 Bill Steigerwald (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Excellent

This book was an interesting look at the Jim Crow South post ww2. Being a gringo married to a black woman I'm interested in racism. In particular the mentality of the south. Having lived in the south 30 years ago and having had an ex southern father in law , I'm always trying to understand what led to that backward thinking. Much of this is explained by Thomas Sowell in "black red necks and white liberals". This book touched on many of the same topics. It also touched on the different dynamics and political tensions at the time. This book is quite simply a story about a journalist who presented himself as a black man for a month in the South. The justifications for segregation have been fostered up until my generation. I remember prior relatives defending apartheid in South Africa. It makes me shutter to think about. The same arguments used in 1949 were the same being made as late as the 1990s. We are doing better. Books like this help paint the picture. The writing style is simple. The narrative flows along nicely. Great narrator.

Another must listen

We’ve seen, heard and read about things he describes and worse but to hear it from a white man’s point of view while undercover as a black man and describing the things that wasn’t put in movies, minute by minute and hour by hour lives of black people. I’m so ashamed of the US and mortified by the south which I grew up proud to be. Everyone should listen to this but it should be required reading in every school in the south and I wish there was a way to get every white adult living in the south to read it, especially the older ones that like to use the “things were different back then” excuse. Yes, they were different, because most of you were monsters and most of the rest turned a blind eye. Things are different now because #1 black people aren’t taking it anymore and #2 one I’m so proud of, this younger generation coming up is different. I don’t know why we didn’t have a generation with a conscience about such things until now.

Misleading

The book is more about the author and politics.It has very little to do with the life of a black man.

Jim Crow & racism!

Could facts like these be the reason why some people don't want CRT taught to their children!

o

started out little off track. took getting to the 5th chapter for him to talk about being a black man for 30 days. other then that enjoyed it