Blind Like Me: John Howard Griffin, Disability, Intersectionality, and Civil Rights in Postwar America

More than fifty years after the publication of Black Like Me, scholars have yet to realize the potential for using John Howard Griffin and his famous book to alter some of our fundamental assumptions about identity and civil rights in postwar America. Reading Black Like Me in conjunction with Griffin's writings about blindness shows how disability shaped one of the twentieth century's most popular and influential texts about passing, racism, and civil rights. More broadly, an intersectional framing of Griffin's life and writings helps reveal the complicated and sometimes strained relationship between African American and disability rights in modern America.