![]() Under the supervision of a New Orleans-based dermatologist, Griffin would spend a week under a sun lamp, up to 15 hours a day, soaking up UV rays. In order to do so, Griffin did something unprecedented: he altered his pigment. In order for the United States to open its eyes to the deterministic weight of color, Griffin decided to “become” a black man and write about it. “The blind,” Griffin would go on to write, “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.”Īnd thus an idea was born. Unable to tell the speakers’ races from their voices, Griffin began to see color anew. In 1956, Griffin, blind at the time, sat in on a panel discussion in Mansfield, Texas about desegregation. ![]() ![]() It was blindness that inspired John Howard Griffin, a white author and journalist from Dallas, Texas, to write about color in the United States. ![]()
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