When Griffin was kicked off the car, he was left a far distance from everything. Continuing his trip to Montgomery, he covered a long distance with the help from passing white drivers (some were perverted) who gave him rides during the night time. East, a white friend who writes in a black newspaper in Mobile and visited his family for a while. In the hotel, Griffin tried to write a letter to his family, but there were too many things blocking his mind.

They arrived in Hattiesburg and John took a cab to a hotel to rest. The Negroes were about to urinate all over the bus, but they decided it would just be another thing for the whites to hold against blacks. Griffin boarded the bus, and during the trip he conversed with a man named Christophe, and when the white passengers got off the bus during the rest stop, the bus driver prevented the Negro passengers from departing. At the bus station, Griffin acquired “hate stares” from many whites on the benches waiting for their buses. When Griffin gets news that a white jury rejected a case of a black lynching, Griffin decides to go to the heart of the deep south, Mississippi to check it out.Įven with the risk of his life, Griffin decides to take a bus to Hattiesburg into the deep south to check out the lynching case. John was harassed by some white supremacists, while with Negroes, was treated with courtesies, even by strangers. While in New Orleans, Griffin discussed race issues with other African Americans. He meets a shoeshiner named Sterling Williams who gives Griffin friendship, and the opportunity to be incorporated in the African American society. John begins his journey in New Orleans where he gets his first taste of what it is like to be black. The overall main obstacle is society, and the racial divide in the south with the whites.

What Griffin hopes to achieve is enough information about the relationships between blacks and whites to write a book about it. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin is a Multicultural story set in the south around the late 1950’s in first person point of view about John Griffin in 1959 in the deep south of the east coast, who is a novelist that decides to get his skin temporarily darkened medically to black.

Griffin black like me