DOI: 10.4324/9781003240785-7 “And herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor— all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked— who is good? not that men are ignorant—what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.” (W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk) Sixty years ago, in 1961, the white Texan John Howard Griffin pub- lished Black Like Me, the best-selling memoir of his six-week journey through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia disguised as a Black man. Griffin dyed his skin black and shaved his head to remove traces of his natural ethnicity. The disguise was as complete as he could make it, and as he tells the story he easily passed as Black, despite resolv- ing never to lie about his name or identity during his travels. When he was done, he had successfully replicated for his 1960s readers the bitter experience of oppression commonplace to mid-century Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. I read Black Like Me at the age of ten, when it first appeared. I was just beginning to make my way through hard books; Black Like Me was a stretch. It helped that I read it with a close friend, two years older (we had a kind of informal book club that summer). This book was making a big splash, and we wanted to be in on it. I’ve forgotten most of that orig- inal reading. But I remember the paperback’s cover, the back of a Black man’s head as he marched purposefully away from the reader into a hall of racist horrors beyond my ken. No Black people lived in my California beachside community, and “the South” was a distant place that I didn’t guess I’d ever visit. This book, with its shadowy figure striding forth into the unknown, offered a window onto a place I couldn’t know on my own, an adult world, an important one where history would be made. In retrospect, Black Like Me fully lived up to its promise of helping to shape a rising generation’s attitudes about racial equality. But reread- ing the book in its 60th anniversary year—and confronting what has changed over the decades—reminds me there is still more we can learn from this book, even as I realize uneasily that some of its features do Rereading Black Like Me Speech Matters, Context Matters Kathryn L. Lynch 1 7