News of the jury’s decision not to indict the murderers reached John Howard Griffin when he was still in the first several days of posing as a black man in New Orleans. Despite the fact that several of these men actually confessed to having done this, the jury didn’t indict any of them for their crimes, effectively sending the message that white people can do whatever they want to black people without having to fear the consequences of their actions. He was arrested and put in jail to await his trial, but a group of enraged white men took him from his cell three days before his hearing and brutally beat him to death.

In Mississippi in 1959, a young black man named Mack Parker was accused of raping a pregnant white woman. Thankfully, though, he survived, though he died only five years later due to a struggle against diabetes. In 1975-fourteen years after the publication of Black Like Me-members of the Ku Klux Klan jumped Griffin and gave him a life-threatening beating. In the decades following this book, Griffin became a civil rights activist, often working with well-known figures like Martin Luther King Jr. In 1957, he inexplicably regained his sight, and two years later began conducting the social experiment that led to the publication of Black Like Me in 1961. Blind for the next ten years, he became devoutly Catholic and began publishing fiction and essays about his experience as a blind man. As part of the Air Corps, he went to the South Pacific, where he later suffered a concussion so severe that he lost his eyesight and returned home. Unfortunately, though, the Nazis soon learned of his involvement in such activities, so he fled the country, returning to the United States and joining the military. When he was nineteen, he became a medic and worked as part of the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of Europe, eventually helping transport Jewish people to England. After spending his childhood in Dallas, Texas, John Howard Griffin moved to France to become a doctor.

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