Mt. Lebanon native publishes book on work of Pittsburgh journalist
Bill Steigerwald believes there are parts of history that need to be revisited and spotlighted.
Ray Sprigle is one of those examples, Steigerwald said, and he wants to change that with his new book, “30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South”
In 1948, Sprigle, a white journalist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, pretended to be a black man for 30 days in the Jim Crow South and penned a 21-part series about his experiences. The series, titled, “I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days,” ran on the front page of the Post-Gazette for 21 straight days. It was also syndicated to more than a dozen other newspapers in the North along with the Pittsburgh Courier, which gave access to some black people in the South to read Sprigle’s work.
“Sprigle shocked the North, he pissed off the South and he pleased millions of black citizens,” said Steigerwald, a Mt. Lebanon native, during a book event at Mt. Lebanon Public Library on Sept. 11. “He started the first national debate in the media about ending legal segregation.”
Some may recognize the tactic Sprigle used, as John Howard Griffin used a similar one for his 1961 book “Black Like Me,” which was made into a movie and now is read in high schools all across the country.
Steigerwald, who spent more than 30 years as a professional journalist, said the reason Sprigle and his journey aren’t well-known today is because he was “ahead of his time.”
Sprigle’s account of the Jim Crow South came before key moments in civil rights history, such as Brown v. Board of Education, the murder of Emmett Till and Rosa Parks’ bus boycott.
“He suffered because he was ahead of the curve,” Steigerwald said. “No one was doing this. The New York Times didn’t send anyone down there to write this, and (neither) did Time Magazine.”
To disguise himself as a black man, Sprigle went to Tampa, Fla., for several weeks to get a tan and dressed much differently. He befriended Walter White, head of the NAACP, and pretended to be an NAACP field investigator while being escorted by John Wesley Dobbs, a civil rights activist.
“The only way he’s going to learn what it’s really like to be a black person under Jim Crow was to pretend to be one,” Steigerwald said.
“I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days” wasn’t the first time Sprigle had gone undercover or published influential work.
In the late 1920s, Sprigle, who lived in Moon, got a job as a coal miner and wrote several stories about his experiences. A few years later, he acted as an attendant at Mayview State Hospital, and in 1945 he pretended to be a black market meat vendor. Scrunched between those undercover exposes, Sprigle won a Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for breaking the story that newly-appointed Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black had previously been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
“He was a true Pittsburgh celebrity,” Steigerwald said. “He could sell 30,000 extra copies of the Post-Gazette with one of his investigative series.”
“30 Days a Black Man” is Steigerwald’s second book. In 2012, he published “Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about ‘Travels With Charley.'”
Steigerwald discovered Sprigle’s account while working for the Post-Gazette in the 1990s. He wrote a Sunday feature in the Post-Gazette in 1998 for the 50th anniversary of Sprigle’s trip and revisited the topic in 2009.
“It ended up being something that I felt that I had a duty to do,” said Steigerwald.