Word: griffins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...primary voting. The system for years enabled staunch segregationists to be elected by favoring the rural counties over the more liberal urban vote. This summer, combined statewide vote tabulations resulted in the selection of the moderate Carl Sanders as the Democratic gubernatorial candidate over the radical segregationist Marvin Griffin...
...Griffin's observations about his two drivers are more humane than one would have expected. He tries to see the first man as he must function among whites, a respected member of his community trying to be decent with his family and his friends. The second, he realizes, is neither consciously insulting him nor is he especially perverted. He simply cannot imagine that Negroes might be human beings...
Black Like Me is by no means a perfect book. For one thing, Griffin's reactions to his experience are intensified by his newness to it. Besides, he can always escape if he gets too scared, as he does once during a particularly depressing night in Mississippi. While he is black, Griffin absorbs all the pain being a Negro involves, but he can find none of the real pleasures of being a human being: he makes no intimate friendships, has no wife or children, grows attached to no place...
...style has disturbing weaknesses. He is impossibly bad at reproducing dialogue, either Negro or white. Nor does his eye for detail, his feeling for character or his sense of humor quite do the experience justice. The reader is never quite brought inside the world Griffin is describing...
...these gifts might have destroyed the quality in Griffin that finally lends his writing such force: his almost self-effacing modesty, and his real decency. He describes for us a world that we will never see, and uses his personality simply to transmit the Negro's experience. And if the experience of being a Negro in the South is an almost unbearably ugly one, that makes it all the more essential that we leave our own comfortable world long enough to learn about...