Author Bill Steigerwald recounts Ray Sprigle’s journey in ‘30 Days a Black Man’

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Author Bill Steigerwald believes that Ray Sprigle was the Roberto Clemente of journalism. Both men were superstars in their fields but never achieved the level of deserved acclaim outside of Pittsburgh.

Sprigle, a white Pulitzer Prizewinning writer at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, is the subject of Mr. Steigerwald’s latest book, “30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South” (Lyons Press).

“If Sprigle had done what he did with the 1948 trip, [writing for newspapers] in New York or Los Angeles, Spencer Tracy would have played him in a movie,” Mr. Steigerwald said.

Sprigle’s decision to go undercover as one of 10 million AfricanAmericans in the Deep South in 1948 resulted in his splashy 21-part series, “I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days.” Papers across the country carried it, although none south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The Pittsburgh Courier also ran it.

“He shocked the white North,” Mr. Steigerwald said. “The good people of the white North had no clue and he really [ticked] off people in the South: ‘Who is this Yankee guy, coming down here and causing trouble?’ ”

Mr. Sprigle, who lived on a farm in Moon, was the Post-Gazette’s star reporter, a man who would, before his death in a 1957 car accident, have other blockbuster projects. His expose proving U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan earned the 1938 Pulitzer Prize.

Another time, he posed as an attendant at the now-demolished Mayview State Hospital in South Fayette to write about conditions there. And in 1945, he “became” a black market meat vendor to expose violations of the federal war rationing system.

“He started the first national debate about ending segregation in the South,” Mr. Steigerwald said. “One guy, one crazy good journalist.”

Mr. Steigerwald’s book follows Sprigle’s journey and also makes the case for him as “under-honored” for the work.

With the help of black civil and political activist John Wesley Dobbs, a heavily suntanned Sprigle played a subservient black man. He observed shocking differences in public funding between the races, met with families who