African American Civil Rights and Ray Sprigle's Undercover Reporting on Jim Crow, 1949

Sprigle, Ray. In the Land of Jim Crow, 1949, collects Sprigle's nationally circulated undercover reporting on segregation, racial terror, and daily Black life in the American South before the modern Civil Rights Movement. Backed by NAACP contacts and guided through Black communities, Sprigle traveled while disguised as an African American man, turning his observations into the twenty-one-part series "I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days." The book provides evidence for the study of Jim Crow, white northern journalism, Black institutional networks, and pre-Brown v. Board civil rights publicity. Sprigle, Ray. In the Land of Jim Crow. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1949. First edition. Foreword by Margaret Halsey. Original red cloth covers. Dust jacket present. Sprigle writes of the "bloodstained tragedy" of Jim Crow and states that "fear walks beside the black man," identifying fear as the lesson he learned first during his four-week passage through the segregated South. The reporting grew from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette series and was later expanded into book form. Published six years before Brown v. Board of Education and more than a decade before John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, the book occupies an important place in the history of race reporting and public exposure of segregation. Tight binding; dust jacket with chipping along edges and a chip at top of front panel; book very good, jacket good. A significant postwar civil rights journalism title documenting Jim Crow through an NAACP-assisted undercover investigation.…