In the Land of Jim Crow, A White Journalist's Groundbreaking Masquerade as a Black Man in the 1940s Jim Crow South

SPRIGLE, Ray. In the Land of Jim Crow. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949. First edition, with no statement of edition or printing on the copyright page. 215 pages. 8" x 5.5" inches. Original red paper boards with the original dust jacket unclipped. In 1948 white journalist Ray Sprigle met with NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White for help with his plan to travel as a black man in the South. Walter White tapped civil rights leader John Wesley Dobbs to be Springle's guide as he crossed "the race line in mid-20th-century America." It was a time when "the best white print journalists in the North and South, including Sprigle, had neglected, ignored, or not noticed the unconstitutional and shameful elephant in the national newsroom." Sprigle and Dobbs embarked upon a thirty day, 4000 mile journey across the South, where Dobbs took Sprigle into many black communities and introduced him as an NAACP field investigator to people he otherwise would never have been able to meet or interview. Over a decade before publication of Griffin's Black Like Me (1961), Sprigle used sun tanning sessions to turn his skin dark. Once in the South, Dobbs introduced Sprigle to "black doctors and undertakers, to sharecroppers, and to the families of lynching victims... what Sprigle was seeing made him ashamed to be an American" (Steigerwald,1-12). He writes bluntly of the "bloodstained tragedy" of Jim Crow, where "fear walks beside the black man in the Southland from his earliest boyhood to the bed in which he dies. And fear was the lesson that I learned first and the lesson that I learned best in my four-week lifetime as Negro in the South." ), Sprigle won a Pulitzer Prize in 1937 for uncovering Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black's KKK past. Foreword by Margaret Halsey. Serialized in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette the same year under the title, "I was a Negro in the South for 30 Days." The dust jacket has a 0.5" x 1" paper loss in the top left corner, and some mild edgewear. The book is tight and overall in very good condition.