The Man Who Would Be Black

On a sunny November day in 1959, a tall, brown-haired Texas writer entered a New Orleans house. Four days later a bald, unemployed black man emerged. Both men were John Howard Griffin, and he was setting out on a journey that no white man had ever made before. In a compelling profile, Ernest Sharpe, Jr., tells of the tortured, poetic man whose four-week sojourn as an itinerant black—which led to the immensely influential best seller Black like Me —changed many lives, including Griffin’s own.