By the late 1960s, however, the civil rights movement and rioting in Northern cities highlighted the national scale of racial injustice and overshadowed Griffin’s experiment in the South. Black Like Me, said activist Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), “is an excellent book—for whites.” Griffin agreed; he eventually curtailed his lecturing on the book, finding it “absurd for a white man to presume to speak for black people when they have superlative voices of their own.”
Here’s how John Howard Griffin did it when writing Black Like Me:
In late 1959, John Howard Griffin went to a friend’s house in New Orleans, Louisiana. Once there, under the care of a dermatologist, Griffin underwent a regimen of large oral doses of the anti-vitiligo drug methoxsalen, and spent up to 15 hours daily under an ultraviolet lamp for about a week. He was given regular blood tests to ensure that he was not suffering liver damage. The darkening of his skin was not perfect, so he touched it up with stain. He shaved his head bald to hide his straight brown hair.
There was another writer who did the same thing in the 60s or 70s. His book was called “Black like me”
He used melanin pills and makeup
That was brought up in the article but they didn’t go into much detail. How was that book received?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/black-like-me-50-years-later-74543463/ Here’s an interesting article on that.
There is such thing as melanin pills?
Here’s how John Howard Griffin did it when writing Black Like Me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Like_Me