Who remembers "Black Like Me"? It was published just as...

[TreasonousBastard]

I was entering high school and was a really big thing.

It's in my local library and Barnes&Noble has the ebook for 3 bucks less than amazon.

[tblue37]

1. It's an important book. I read it a long time ago.

[multigraincracker]

2. It helped shape my reality at an early age.

Is on any list to be removed or burned?

[TreasonousBastard]

4. Not that I know of, but bookburners probably don't know about it.

[tavernier]

30. Same.

Eye opener for a 16 year old white girl in middle class home.

[Raine1967]

3. I have a paperback copy from 1961, I think.

It's an unauthorized version of the hardcover version. The original was printed in 1960.

I must have read it about 25 years ago and although I feel like I have learned much more since then, I think I should read it again.

When the book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Barbara Ehrenreich: 2001) was published, I remember how shocked I was and I talked about it with my friend. He said something to the effect of you think that shocking? I have something else for you to read. Then he gave me his paperback copy of "Black Like Me". He was right.

It was a real eye-opener.

Raine

[scarletlib]

5. I read it as a teenager.

It was eye opening. I read it again as e-book a few years age. Well worth it.

[Raine1967]

9. I grew up in a really small town in upstate NY.

I never heard of it until my 30's, from my friend who grew up in that same town. He had family in NYC and Louisiana who lived in Jim Crow. As an adult, it really changed my perspective and everything I was taught by family.

"Black Like Me is an excellent book -- for whites." Stokely Carmichael

The author was incredible. I just read about him here.

[patphil]

25. Just an off-topic question, but where in upstate NY.

I was born in Glens Falls Hospital, and lived the first 20 years of my life in Hudson Falls, NY.
That's about 15 or so miles south of Lake George.

[dumbcat]

36. Also born in upstate NY

in rural Columbia County. I was raised in and around Hudson, NY.

I also read the book in high school in the early 60's.

[Raine1967]

45. Hey former neighbor!

I went to Germantown Central School in the 80's. Hudson was a metropolis compared to us!

[dumbcat]

47. My mother's clan is still there

The Moore clan in and around Germantown. Been there since before the revolutionary war.

I went to Hudson High School in the early '60's. Worked at Olana in the summers when it first opened.

[Raine1967]

49. Holy Moly.

One of my best friends to this day is in that clan! Lashers and Jennings family. G'town is really a small world. Love Olnsa -- spent many a high school afternoon sketching and drawing there. I lived in Clermont about a mile away from the river. We lived across the street from a big racing horses farm.

[dumbcat]

50. Small world

I know both those families. Cousins. Bobbi Gail (Barbara) is my first cousin. We grew up together.

[Raine1967]

51. Took me a few days to respond, Her daughter

and I are still very close. I will be seeing her in a few weeks.

Not sure if you both are still in touch -- especially recently. I may have something to tell you that I would like to share privately via DUmail.

Raine

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

37. Another small town upstate NY person here.

Last edited Sat Feb 5, 2022, 11:28 AM - Edit history (1)

Holland Patent. It's about 10 miles north of Utica.

[Raine1967]

44. Germantown, NY

The school is still one building, K-12. It still has one stoplight.

[Raine1967]

46. Germantown. It's in the Hudson Valley.

I still have friends in Glens Falls.

[Mike Nelson]

6. I remember...

... that book. I read "Black Like Me" when I was a teenager in high school, although it was not taught or mentioned in any curriculum I recall. Students or a teacher might have mentioned the book. More likely, I read about it in a newspaper or magazine. Could have even been "Scholastic Scope."

... I don't know if the book "holds up" today, but back then it was great for a white boy - like me - to read. I also read "The Learning Tree" - "Yes, I Can" and others... don't mind saying I enjoyed Huck Finn and Mockingbird, too... even though they are considered "racist" in some circles.

[struggle4progress]

7. I read it many decades ago. A few years after that,

one of my friends pointed out that I actually knew some people who had hidden John Howard Griffin at the end of his trip: it was true, in fact, but I hadn't made the connection myself. They're long gone now

[MineralMan]

8. Read it in high school.

Learned from it.

[Solomon]

10. They made a movie out of the book. Look for it.

[malaise]

11. My aunt gave me a copy when I was a teenager

Still have it- read it several times and so did my friends

[Doc Sportello]

12. This and another book had a big impact on me

When it came to race. As a teenager I read Black Like Me and 100 Years of Lynching, two books that would never have been taught at my school in the 1960s.

[msfiddlestix]

13. me too.

it sort of feels like it wasn't that long ago. But math says otherwise.

[Tickle]

14. I do!!!!!

That is one of the first books I remember reading.

[ashredux]

15. I read it back in the 60s...it was controversial, but not banned as I recall

[malthaussen]

16. Read it when I was 12.

I remember the school bus driver telling me it was "trash" as I boarded the bus one morning.

Probably too tender an age to have read it, but I also read Treblinka that year, and you might say both books had a large influence on my development.

-- Mal

[Scottie Mom]

17. Read it in approximately 1963 when in high school.

What an eye opener! Over the years, I have remembered how shocked I was about what I had read. Shaped a lot of my thinking and perspectives over a lot of years.

[SWBTATTReg]

18. Still have my copy from when it came out originally. Have read it several times. It's ...

definitely worth reading for those who haven't read it yet. You want to get a picture of racism in the U.S.? This book is for you.

[txwhitedove]

19. We read it in all white high school in mid 1960's in Oklahoma. Powerful.

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

20. Excellent book!

[ShazzieB]

21. I was a teenager when I read it.

Trying to remember where I got it. I think it was in my high school library. I went to a very small high school but there were a lot of books in that library that expanded my world view, especially books about Martin Luther King and the Civil rights movement.

The one that blew my mind the most was about the principles of nonviolence and how MLK got a lot of his ideas from Gandhi. I was raised a Baptist and had always been taught that the answers to all life's questions were to be found in the Bible. The idea that King, a Baptist preacher, could be find so much of great value in the ideas of Gandhi, who wasn't even a Christian, was a real paradigm shift for a kid with my limited background.

[Hortensis]

22. I read it as a kid, not assigned but prominent enough that

Last edited Fri Feb 4, 2022, 11:33 AM - Edit history (2)

I heard about it. For some reason I remember some lone woman giving him a hate stare he was supposed to see, not the only one but I remember marveling at her.

I just googled, wondering how the book came across today, when we don't need white men telling us it's all true according to them, and found this article. I had no idea he was such a remarkable man, or what he and his family subsequently went through during their own personal part of the civil rights era.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/black-like-me-50-years-later-74543463/

'"Black Like Me, said activist Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), “is an excellent book—for whites.” Griffin agreed;...finding it “absurd for a white man to presume to speak for black people when they have superlative voices of their own.”'

[maddiemom]

32. NOT THE POINT NOR PURPOSE of the book!

I remember that was my reaction to Mr. Carmichael's critique.

[Hortensis]

39. You remember it?! :) No, it wasn't, and I almost didn't copy

the last part of Carmichael's statement, but I thought that from him even sarcastically saying it was "excellent for white people" was a significant endorsement.

Absurdly, the only other book of that era pertaining at all to that topic that I read was Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice. Big eye-roll on that as a selection, and NOT to insult Griffin or his book by comparing them in any way! By the time Cleaver's misogynistic Marxist black nationalism became misogynistic establishment Republicanism, I was a lot older and amused but not surprised. Those who'd aged from "anti-whatever" LW activism to RW "anti-whatever" Republicanism were not exactly uncommon. And won't be in future.

Griffin was special. Wish I'd realized better then, but we didn't have the world in our hands.

[maddiemom]

41. Yes, I remember that it came out about the time I started high school.

I don't remember it being assigned in either high school or college, but there was so much word of mouth, and it began to show up on reading lists (this was in western PA). BTW, there were no black kids in my H.S. class of over 200. I didn't have any black friends until college. I read and remember the book very well. It WAS aimed at white people and a brilliant idea. I can't believe how badly Carmichael missed the point. You're right. I read, but barely remember "Soul on Ice,'" except as the typical "Black Rage" so popular for that time. I never was assigned that one either, but did "grow up" to be an English teacher.

[Hortensis]

42. What a great thing to be, though

these are notably interesting times for teachers, whether having to work through them or just observing.

No idea if Carmichael missed the point or just chose to ignore it to pivot to another message. Both very possible, but of course an English teacher would want to take a red pencil to it.

[twodogsbarking]

23. John Howard Griffith. Read when I was 14.

Hope they ban it so more people read it.

[papa3times]

24. I read this book

when I was 12 and it had a big impact on me. It reinforced the idea I already had of how ridiculous our racist society was.

[barbtries]

26. i just read it for the first time

in 2019 or 2020. I may have read it in high school or just studied it in school, but this time i read it all.

[ananda]

27. That was a good book.

The making of it was interesting too.

[samnsara]

28. yes i remember it but never read it

[Marthe48]

29. I read it just a few years ago

It horrified me. The reality that some people are living still horrifies me.

[Swede]

31. We read it in school in grade 10.

It was a part of social studies.

[Greybnk48]

33. I read it in high school in the 60's (on my own). It was a good movie too,

starring James Whitmore as the lead.

[Chili Pepper]

34. I read this in Junior High in the early 70's

I had never heard of the book before nor had I heard it mentioned the rest of my time in Jr High and High School. I should mention there were no blacks in my school during that time.

My family was leaving for a vacation in the midst of the school year. Rather than assigning me homework for the time I was going to miss, my social studies teacher told me to read this book instead and we'd discuss it when I returned. As others have mentioned, it was a real eye-opener even for a young teenager. That 50 year old paperback now sits on my son's bookshelf.

I'd never really liked my social studies teacher much and thought he was a real jerk. It wasn't until much later that I found new respect for him for having me read that book while we both lived in our lily white community.

[dumbcat]

35. Read it as a teenager in the early 60's

in high school. I don't remember a lot about it, but I do remember that I was impressed with it.

[LizBeth]

38. That one stayed with me for decades. I read when about 10. Bought for my boys

when they were young.

[StarryNite]

40. I read the book and saw the movie with James Whitmore.

[Mr.Bill]

43. I read it in high school in the late 60s.

My high school was 49% Hispanic and 39% Black. I looked like Opie Taylor.

I wouldn't trade the cultural diversity I experienced for anything.

[PatSeg]

48. I remember the book

Though I had no idea what a fascinating life he had led.

Griffin was studying psychiatry in France when Hitler’s troops invaded Poland in 1939. Finding himself “in the presence of a terrible human tragedy,” he joined the French Resistance and helped smuggle Jewish children to England. When he told an informer of a plan to help a family escape, his name turned up on a Nazi death list. Fleeing just ahead of the Gestapo, Griffin returned to Texas in 1941 and enlisted in the Army Air Corps shortly after Pearl Harbor.

snip

After getting blasted with shrapnel in an enemy air raid a few months before the end of the war, Griffin awoke in a hospital, seeing only shadows; eventually, he saw nothing. The experience was revealing. The blind, he wrote, “can only see the heart and intelligence of a man, and nothing in these things indicates in the slightest whether a man is white or black.” Blindness also forced Griffin to find new strengths and talents. Over the next decade, he converted to Catholicism, began giving lectures on Gregorian chants and music history, married and had the first of four children. He also published two novels based on his wartime experience. Then in 1955, spinal malaria paralyzed his legs.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/black-like-me-50-years-later-74543463/

Such a remarkable human being.

[PCIntern]

52. I met the author right before he died

He came to my school to speak. If I remember correctly he died from a condition which was caused by the process he utilized. I was on our Arts Festival Technical group and fit him with his microphone and handled the recording of his speech and interactions with the audience including Q&A.