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John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes

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Famous John Howard Griffin Quotes

“Now you take dark Negroes like you, Mr. Griffin, and me," he went on. "We're old Uncle Toms to our people, no matter how much education and morals we've got. No, you have to be almost a mulatto, have your hair conked and all slicked out and look like a Valentino. Then the Negro will look up to you. You've got class. Isn't that a pitiful hero-type?" "And the white man knows that," Mr. Davis said. "Yes," the cafe owner continued. "He utilizes this knowledge to flatter some of us, tell us we're above our people, not like most Negroes. We're so stupid we fall for it and work against own own. Why, if we'd work just half as hard to boost our race as we do to please whites whose attentions flatter us, we'd really get somewhere.”

ElitismRace IssuesDisunity
Book:Black Like Me
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“I learned a strange thing... that in a jumble of unintelligible talk, the word "nigger" leaps out with electric clarity. You always hear it and it always stings. And always it casts the person using it into a category of brute ignorance. I thought with some amusement that if these two women only knew what they were revealing about themselves to every Negro on that bus, they would have been outraged.”

IgnoranceHatredVulgaritySlursRacial Slurs
Book:Black Like Me
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“Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you. It was so new I could not take my eyes from the man's face. I felt like saying: "What in God's name are you doing to yourself?”

MenFeelsHumansHeartKindShowsLightEyeFacesNamesLostFeltFearHorrorHatredSickThreatInsanityInhumanObsceneObscenityWithering
Book:Black Like Me: The Definitive Griffin Estate Edition
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“The completeness of this transformation appalled me. It was unlike anything I had imagined. I became two men, the serving one, and the one who panicked, who felt Negroid even to the depths of my entrails. I felt the beginings of great loneliness, not because I was a Negro, but because the man I had been, the self I knew, was hidden in the flesh of another.”

MenTwoSelfFeltLonelinessHe ManTransformationDepthFleshServingCompleteness
Author:John Howard Griffin
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“The Negro. The South. These are the details. The real story is the universal one of men who destroy the souls of other men (and in the process destroy themselves) for reasons neither really understands. It is the story of the persecuted, the defrauded, the feared, and detested. I could have been a Jew in Germany, a Mexican in a number of states, or a member of any 'inferior' group. Only the details would have differed. The story would be the same.”

MenHas BeensRealSoulStatesReasonStoriesWould BeProcessNumbersGroupsMembersUniversalSouthJewDetailsGermanyInferiorsCould Have BeenMexicanPersecutedReal Story
Author:John Howard Griffin
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