Brother Crawford

On a tidy farm near Chickamauga, Ga., the Negro Masonic lodge held its meeting in the open air. After a picnic supper, with heaps of fried chicken and hot biscuits, everybody filed into a little church in a grove. The ladies put on a fine program of songs and recitations. Then Brother Haslerig, the chairman, called on his house guest, Brother James R. Crawford, to offer a few remarks "preferably regarding the status of our people back in Pittsburgh." But it was getting late, so the visitor from Pittsburgh just stood and took a bow.

Brother Crawford was glad he didn't have to make a speech, for it would have been a deception. Brother Crawford was a man with a dark secret. In four weeks and 4,000 miles of travel through the South, nobody guessed that he was really Ray Sprigle, free, white and 61, and the shrewdest reporter on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's staff.

Other outsiders, including Russia's poison-penned Ilya Ehrenburg, had toured the land of cotton in search of sensation. But Sprigle had "crossed over" to see it through the Negro's eyes. Last week, in his own paper and 13 others (none of them south of what he had learned to call the "Smith & Wesson" line), Sprigle began telling what he saw "In the Land of Jim Crow." As an account of man's inhumanity to man--and man's capacity for enduring it--his series made Gentleman's Agreement seem gentlemanly indeed.

Masquerader. He spent six months preparing to "pass." To stain his skin, he tried walnut juice, iodine, Argyrol, even an infusion of mahogany bark. When nothing worked, he shaved his pate and settled for three weeks in the Florida sun. Disguises were an old dodge to Reporter Sprigle, who won a Pulitzer Prize (1937) for uncovering Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black's past as a Ku Klux Klan member. Three years ago, elaborately roughed up as a black marketeer, he had exposed a meat-rationing scandal in Pittsburgh (TIME, April 30, 1945).

One day, in Washington's Union Station, sun-browned Reporter Sprigle, alias Brother Crawford, climbed aboard a Jim Crow coach with his guide, a Negro businessman (and the only Negro who was in on his identity). Only his guide, his family and his Post-Gazette editors knew what Sprigle was up to. "From then on," he wrote, "until I came up out of the South four weeks later, I was black, and in bondage--not quite slavery but not quite freedom, either. My rights of citizenship ran only as far as the nearest white man said they did."

Being well coached, he never caused an "incident"; he learned to touch his cap and be deferential to white people. He used the "for colored" entrances at stations, drank out of Jim Crow fountains, sat in Jim Crow parks and rode Jim Crow taxis, saw (and resented) many a town's Jim Crow honor rolls of war dead. In Georgia he found that even the Atlantic Ocean was Jim Crow, without "a single foot where a Negro can stick a toe in salt water."

Along the way, he talked to hundreds of members of his temporary race: underfed sharecroppers and prospering professional men, schoolmarms and families of lynch victims. In Atlanta he learned that streetcar motormen are allowed to tote guns, and that some do. He documented cases where motormen had shot down black passengers who didn't know their place. But he found a few islands of tolerance, too (e.g., farm communities in Macon and Cook counties, Ga.), where equal rights was more than a phrase.

Half Citizens. When he sat down to write, Sprigle found himself mixing a dash of evangelism into his reporting. "Strangely enough," he wrote, "the Negro in the South doesn't hate the white man . . . But what he does hate with all his heart is the discrimination and the oppression that dog his footsteps from the cradle to the grave. He hates most of all the fact that he is but half a citizen . . . As for what he wants--two things. And in this order. First, the ballot. Second, proper and adequate education for his children."

Bitter Ray Sprigle will never again feel proud to be white. "Give me another couple of months, Jim Crowing it through the South--forever alert never to bump or jostle a white man--careful always to 'sir' even the most bedraggled specimen of the Master Race--scared to death I might encounter a pistol-totin', trigger-happy, drunken deputy sheriff or a hysterical white woman--and I'm pretty sure I'd be hating the whole damned white race."

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