American Popular Culture Commons^™

The Rhetorical Effectiveness Of Black Like Me, Hugh Rank

English Faculty Publications

In 1959, John Howard Griffin, a white Southern novelist, disguised himself as a Negro and traveled through the South to experience "what it is like to be a Negro in a land where we keep the Negro down." The brief narrative account of this experience is recorded in Black Like Me, a book which wom the Saturday Review's Anisfield-Wolf award in 1962 for its contribution toward race relations. In brief, why is Black Like Me rhetorically effective?