Reply #1: John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me was quite shocking to us white liberal kids when it came out [View All]

[struggle4progress]

http://books.google.com/books?id=ObTddfcqk2gC&pg=PA15

... Decherd Turner, the greatest librarian in Texas and a lifelong, passionate liberal ... was a friend of John Howard Griffin, who in the 1950s used chemicals to darken his skin and described how he was treated in Texas and the rest of the South in Black Like Me, a book admired by W H Auden, among others. After it was published, Griffin, fearing for his life, moved in for a time with the Turner family in Dallas ...
An unperson in Texas
Michael Lind
Published 13 October 2003
http://www.newstatesman.com/200310130020

I actually met both Decherd Turner and his wife Margaret Ann (who play an incidental role in that book) many years ago. Decherd had originally been a minister before becoming a librarian (first at SMU and later at the University of Texas), but did not learn until quite a long time afterwards that they were the Turners mentioned in Griffin's book, which I had earlier discovered in the library. The Turners both died early in this century, one soon after the other.