Born in Texas on June 16, 1920, [John Howard] Griffin was educated in France, where he studied medicine and music until the outbreak of World War II. After the German occupation he helped run a network smuggling Jews out of the country and narrowly escaped arrest by the Gestapo. He spent most of the war in military service in the South Pacific. Toward the end of the war a nearby explosion impaired his vision and eventually left him completely blind....
Then in 1957 something miraculous happened. A blockage of the circulation of blood to the optic nerve suddenly opened, restoring his sight. He saw his wife and two young children for the first time....
With the return of his sight Griffin became aware of how much we do not see, of the way superficial appearances an serve as obstacles to true perception-- especially in the illusion that allows us to regard our fellow humans as "the intrinsic other." Nowhere did this seem so true as in the case of American racism. Yet Griffin was struck by the frequent challenge from black friends: "The only way you can know what it's like is to wake up in my skin." He took these words to heart.
The book received and sustained enormous attention, though not all readers recognized it as a deeply spiritual work. Griffin's con erns went beyond a set of social conditions to the underlying disease of the soul. His book was really a meditation on the effects of dehumanization, both for the persecuted and the persecutors themselves. As he described it, he had changed nothing but the color of his skin-- and yet that was everything. Suddenly doors closed, smiles became frowns -- or worse. He discovered the hateful face that white Americans reserved for blacks; it was a devastating experience.
"Future historians," he wrote later, "will be mystified that generations of us could stand in the midst of sickness and never see it, never really feel how our System distorted and dwarfed human lives because these lives happened to inhabit bodies encased in a darker skin; and how, in cooperating with this System, it distorted and dwarfed our own lives in a subtle and terrible way."
After his story was published, Griffin was exposed to a more personal form of hostility. His body was hung in effigy on the main street of his town. His life was repeatedly threatened. Nevertheless, he threw himself into a decade of tireless work on behalf of the growing civil rights movement....
For years Griffin suffered from a range of afflictions, some possibly induced by the skin treatments he had undergone years before. He died (of "everything" according to his wife) on September 8,1980.
