30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South
About this audiobook
In 1948, most white people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for the ten million African Americans living in the South. But that suddenly changed after Ray Sprigle, a famous white journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a black man in the Jim Crow South.
Escorted through the South’s parallel black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a historic black civil-rights pioneer from Atlanta, Sprigle met with sharecroppers, local black leaders, and families of lynching victims. He visited ramshackle black schools and slept at the homes of prosperous black farmers and doctors. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter’s series was syndicated coast to coast in white newspapers and carried into the South only by the Pittsburgh Courier, the country’s leading black paper. His vivid descriptions and undisguised outrage at “the iniquitous Jim Crow system” shocked the North, enraged the South, and ignited the first national debate in the media about ending America’s system of apartheid.
Six years before Brown v. Board of Education, seven before the murder of Emmett Till, and thirteen before John Howard Griffin’s similar experiment became the bestseller Black Like Me, Sprigle’s intrepid journalism blasted into the American consciousness the grim reality of black lives in the South.
About the author
Bill Steigerwald ’s thirty-six-year career as a journalist included stints with the Los Angeles Times, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. His work has appeared in dozens of major American papers and in magazines as disparate as Reason, Family Circle, and Penthouse. He lives just outside Pittsburgh.
Juan Williams, one of America’s leading journalists, is a political analyst for Fox News, a regular panelist on Fox Broadcasting’s Sunday morning public affairs program, Fox News Sunday, and a columnist for FoxNews.com and The Hill. He hosted NPR’s Talk of the Nation and has anchored Fox News Channel’s weekend daytime news coverage. A former senior correspondent and political analyst for NPR, he is the author of the bestselling book Enough; the critically acclaimed biography Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary; and the national bestseller Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, the companion volume to the critically acclaimed television series. During his twenty-one-year career at the Washington Post, Williams served as an editorial writer, op-ed columnist, and White House reporter. His articles have appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Atlantic Monthly, Ebony, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, and New Republic.
Grover Gardner has recorded more than 650 audiobooks since beginning his career in 1981. He's been named one of the "Best Voices of the Century" as well as a "Golden Voice" by AudioFile magazine. Gardner has garnered over 20 AudioFile Earphones Awards and is the recipient of an Audio Publishers Association Audie Award, as well as a three-time finalist. In 2005, Publishers Weekly deemed him "Audiobook Narrator of the Year." Gardner has also narrated hundreds of audiobooks under the names Tom Parker and Alexander Adams. Among his many titles are Marcus Sakey's At the City's Edge, as well as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and John Irving's The Cider House Rules. Gardner studied Theater and Art History at Rollins College and received a Master's degree in Acting from George Washington University. He lives in Oregon with his significant other and daughter.
