Experiencing Prejudice In Black Like Me

Libba Bray once said, “And that is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment.” In the novel Black Like Me, set in the deep south in 1959, John Howard Griffin shares his true accounts of extreme prejudice, severe segregation, and small acts of kindness through the eyes of a black man who was once white. John Griffin, a white racial equality journalist in Texas, decided to darken his pigment and record his experiences as a Negro in the south. He wanted to expose the truth to the world, To truly effect change, one must live the life of another to fully fathom his or her world.

After John Griffin had cashed a traveler‘s check at a local Catholic bookstore, he went to the bus station to buy a ticket to Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

John acted politely to the ticket—seller but with no luck, she still was extremely rude and hateful towards a man she had never even met in the story, John thought about the surly woman; “1 framed the words in my mind: ‘Pardon me, but have I done something to offend you?’ But I realized I had done nothing-my color had offended her.

” Still waiting for his ticket and change, the ticket-seller hurled his ticket and money at him. Her actions were so unnecessary and spiteful that John actually felt sorry for her, making embarrassment creep onto her cheeks. John now understood that as a black person, he was going to be judged by strangers everywhere he went.

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0n the way to Hattiesburg, there was a rest stop for the passengers on the bus.

The driver decided to only let white people off the bus. John and the other black people riding were furious. John tried to confront the driver, asking him if they could use the restroom. The driver yelled at him and slammed the door shut. They had been denied a simple human need because they were colored. John thought about how unfair it was. “I sat in the monochrome gloom of dusk, scarcely believing that in this year of freedom any man could deprive another of anything so basic as the need to quench thirst or use the restroom. There was nothing of the feel of America here. It was rather some strange country suspended in ugliness.” A young Negro even urinated in the back of the bus because he couldn’t take it anymore. John realized that some people would go to an extreme to oppress black people.