He in no way resembled me … I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. 'In the flood of light against white tile, the face and shoulders of a stranger,' he writes, 'a fierce, bald, very dark Negro glared at me from the glass.

In one of the most powerful passages in the book Griffin describes the shock of seeing his new self in the mirror for the first time. He visits a dermatologist who prescribes medication usually given to victims of vitiligo (a disease that causes white spots to appear on the patient's skin) and he supplements the medication with sessions under a sun-lamp and by shaving his hair and rubbing a stain into his skin.

'The only way I could see to bridge the gap between us was to become a Negro,' Griffin writes. On the opening page Griffin set out the question he was attempting to answer: 'What is it like to experience discrimination based on skin colour, something over which one has no control?' No white man could, he reasoned, truly understand what it was like to be black, because black people would never tell the truth to outsiders. Griffin, a lantern-jawed and chestnut-haired white man, deliberately darkened his skin and spent six weeks travelling through the harshly segregated southern states of America, revisiting cities he knew intimately, in the guise of a black man. Black Like Me, the book in question, had been published three years earlier in November 1961 and it had led to its author being both venerated and vilified. The attack was not random the beating represented a particularly brutal form of literary criticism: Griffin was being punished for having written a book.

It took Griffin five months to recover from the assault. Griffin assumed the men were heading over to assist him but instead they dragged him away from his car and proceeded to beat him violently with chains before leaving him for dead. O ne day in 1964 John Howard Griffin, a 44-year-old Texan journalist and novelist, was standing by the side of the road in Mississippi with a flat tyre.

Griffin john howard