An Unforgettable Forgotten Story: "No white journalist ever had tried to live as a Negro--the polite term then in use--in Jim Crow America"... until Ray Sprigle.

• Author: Lessenberry, Jack
• Position: MASS MEDIA

WHEN it came to undercover reporting, Ray Sprigle was the best in the business. During the last months of World War II, he had posed as a black market butcher to expose how easy it was to thwart rationing rules. He also had worked as a coal miner during a bitter miners strike, and booked himself into a snake-pit style mental hospital to reveal the corruption and atrocities there.

He truly had nerves of steel, and would need them in the Deep South. No white journalist ever had tried to live as a Negro--the polite term then in use--in Jim Crow America. The idea was entirely Sprigle's. "I put the suggestion before William Block and Andrew Bernhard, the publisher and editor of our Pittsburgh Post-Gazette" he later wrote. "I didn't have to do too much of a job of selling, and they finally gave me the word to go."

If Block had any reservations, they probably had to do with the fear that Sprigle might get himself killed, which easily could have happened had southern whites figured out who he was and what he was trying to do, but not only did Sprigle, a light-skinned white man manage to pass, he got blacks from all walks of life to trust him when that easily could have gotten them, as well as him, lynched.

For a month, he moved among black people as one of them. He found and later reported the harrowing story of Dr. P.W. Hill, a middle class black dentist from Clarksdale, Miss., whose wife went into labor and died along with their newborn baby because no good hospital in the area would admit a black person.

He told painful stories of separate and unequal schools, of sharecroppers systematically cheated by landowners, and of black war heroes who were cruelly murdered when they had the audacity to try to exercise their basic right to vote.

Knowing that some critics would complain that he was only writing about bad things, Sprigle wrote, "This is no complete and impartial survey of the race problem in the South. I deliberately sought out the worst the South could show me in the way of discrimination and oppression. ... I deliberately sought the evil and the barbarous aspects of the white South's treatment of the Negro. How can you correct evil until you find it?"--but how did he get the stories he did?

The truth only came out decades later. He confided in Walter White, the head of the NAACP, who enthusiastically supported the project. He arranged for Sprigle to travel with the best companion and guide imaginable: John Wesley Dobbs, "a bigger than...