Rereading: Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin

On September 9, 1980, John Howard Griffin, American photographer, journalist, and author died from complications of diabetes at the age of 60. He wrote the famous book 'Black Like Me' where he took the identity of a Black man in the segregated South. An excerpt from the article:

"One day in 1964 John Howard Griffin, a 44-year-old Texan journalist and novelist, was standing by the side of the road in Mississippi with a flat tyre. He saw a group of men approaching him. Griffin assumed the men were heading over to assist him but instead they dragged him away from his car and proceeded to beat him violently with chains before leaving him for dead. It took Griffin five months to recover from the assault. The attack was not random; the beating represented a particularly brutal form of literary criticism: Griffin was being punished for having written a book. Black Like Me, the book in question, had been published three years earlier in November 1961 and it had led to its author being both venerated and vilified. Griffin, a lantern-jawed and chestnut-haired white man, deliberately darkened his skin and spent six weeks travelling through the harshly segregated southern states of America, revisiting cities he knew intimately, in the guise of a black man. On the opening page Griffin set out the question he was attempting to answer: "What is it like to experience discrimination based on skin colour, something over which one has no control?" No white man could, he reasoned, truly understand what it was like to be black, because black people would never tell the truth to outsiders. 'The only way I could see to bridge the gap between us was to become a Negro,' Griffin writes. 'I decided I would do this.'"