Ray Sprigle

Ray Sprigle (August 14, 1886 in Akron, Ohio — December 22, 1957) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Sprigle graduated from Ohio State University. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1938 for a series of articles in the Post-Gazette proving that Hugo Black, newly appointed to the United States Supreme Court by Franklin Roosevelt, had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The evidence that Sprigle uncovered included, among other things, a photostatic copy of a letter from Black written on the stationery of the Alabama Klan asking to resign from the organization.

In May 1948, Sprigle, using the name "James Crawford", took a thirty-day, four-thousand-mile trip through the Deep South pretending to be black. He was supported in this investigation by the NAACP and accompanied by John Wesley Dobbs. He wrote a series of articles based on the journey, which appeared on the front page of the Post-Gazette under the title I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days. The articles formed the basis of Sprigle's 1949 book In the Land of Jim Crow. Sprigle's work predated the more famous John Howard Griffin's similar investigation, reported in Griffin's book Black Like Me, by over a decade.

Works

Ray Sprigle (1949). In the Land of Jim Crow. New York: Simon & Schuster.