Activist, journalist sneaked through South

The black ghost I was chasing belongs to civil rights leader and political activist John Wesley Dobbs (1882-1961). The white ghost belongs to Ray Sprigle, star reporter of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (1886-1957).

Dobbs, 66, was already destined for the history books in 1948. He was a powerful political and civic leader from Atlanta — the unofficial “Mayor of Auburn Avenue” — whose many accomplishments included using black voting power to get the city’s police force integrated in 1948.

Dobbs is fairly well known and appreciated today, especially in Atlanta, where the street he lived on has been named after him. Also, a large sculpture of a mask of his face occupies a corner of Auburn Avenue in the historic black neighborhood where he and the young Martin Luther King Jr. knew each other well.

Dobbs’ life story and the story of his accomplished family, which included his grandson Maynard Jackson Jr., the first black mayor of Atlanta, were detailed in “Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn,” Gary Pomerantz’s 1996 book about the making of modern Atlanta.

But Sprigle? Virtually no one outside Pittsburgh today remembers his odd name. Yet he was a nationally known reporter who won a Pulitzer in 1938 for proving Hugo Black, the Alabama senator FDR picked for the Supreme Court, had been a loyal member of the KKK.

Sprigle, who died on the job in a cab wreck in 1957 at 71, specialized in writing undercover stories of the sensational, circulation-building kind that newspapers no longer want or know how to do. His early undercover work included pretending to be an inmate in a state mental hospital and passing himself off as a black-market meat salesman for a month during World War II.

But it was in May of 1948 — 13 years before John Howard Griffin published his book “Black Like Me” — that Sprigle, at age 61, performed his greatest undercover exploit: He disguised himself as a black man and traveled undercover for 30 days through the Jim Crow South. As he wrote, he “ate, slept, traveled and lived black.”

In August of 1948, Sprigle reported what he experienced in a controversial, highly charged, 21-part syndicated newspaper series that appeared in about 15 papers – all north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Titled “I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days,” it was later repackaged as the 1949 book “In the Land of Jim Crow.”

Sprigle’s blistering attack on the inequalities of segregation and the “iniquitous pattern of oppression and cruelty and discrimination” that blacks endured under Jim Crow drew the ire of much of the unappreciative Southern press.

Later, he took part in a nationally broadcast ABC radio debate on segregation that included Hodding Carter, the “liberal” but diehard segregationist newspaper editor from Greenville, Miss. Carter had written a syndicated six-part series defending the South from what he characterized as a Yankee liberal’s one-sided and “two-faced” assault.

Passing as a light-skinned Negro from Pittsburgh was no small task for Sprigle, a lily-white German-American and conservative Republican who loathed FDR. He tried but could not find chemicals to safely dye his skin, so he had to rely solely on a deep Florida suntan. But it worked.

With the respected Dobbs serving as his cover, guide and wheel-man, the pair put more than 3,000 hard, dusty, bigoted, pre-interstate, pre-Holiday Inn miles on Dobbs’ 1947 Mercury. Dobbs’s identity was such a well-kept secret that his crucial role in Sprigle’s mission was not made public until 1998.

Sprigle and his companion observed but did not enjoy Savannah’s whites-only Atlantic beaches and they stopped at small Georgia towns like Sparta, Adel and McCrae. They also spent a week in the Mississippi Delta, which was why on May 18 I found myself tramping through Shufordville Historical Cemetery, which is hidden behind a pecan grove at the end of a dirt road by the Lyon sewage lagoon.

As Sprigle explained in his series, the mausoleum had been erected in 1948 by a wealthy black Clarksdale dentist, Dr. P.W. Hill, to honor his wife Marjorie and their unborn child.

Both had died in 1939 on an operating table in a black Memphis hospital 78 miles away. Dr. Hill had sent them north by ambulance in the middle of the night because he knew his wife, who needed an emergency Caesarian section to save her life, would not be admitted under any circumstances to the Clarksdale hospital.

Just as I was about to give up my search for Dr. Hill’s family tomb, it emerged from a clump of dense bushes like a Mayan ruin. Far from “gleaming,” its white Alabama marble was soiled and discolored by time and nature.

Inside were five marble vaults, including one carved with “Margie Hill, Born October 30, 1904; Died October 10, 1939.”

In May of 1948, Dr. Hill had proudly shown his newly erected mausoleum to Sprigle and Dobbs. Sprigle wrote that Dr. Hill regarded it “only as his tribute to the ones he loved.” But the Yankee reporter, who by this time had seen as much of Jim Crow’s separate and unequal domain as he could stomach, was not so naïve.

He called Dr. Hill’s tomb “a monument to the cold-blooded cruelty of the white man; to the brutal mandate of a white world that black men and women must die rather than be permitted to defile a cot or an operating table in a white hospital with their black skins.”

I have no idea what Dr. Hill’s tomb would symbolize to Sprigle today. But if the ghosts of Sprigle and Dobbs could repeat their incredible undercover mission, they would be astonished to learn that “invincible” Jim Crow has been dead for decades and southern society is more fully integrated than most of the North.

And they’d also be overjoyed that the poor, oppressive, socially ugly Old South they toured in 1948 — which Sprigle damned in the national media as immoral and un-American and Dobbs devoted his life to trying to change, civilize and liberate — is harder to find in the new and improved South than Dr. Hill’s tragic tomb.

Bill Steigerwald, a writer, lives in Pittsburgh. Thomas Friedman is on vacation.