Where It All Goes Down
The Little Picture
Griffin's wanderlust is on a par with Jack Kerouac's, at least in mileage if not months spent on the road. He leaves his home in Texas in order to roam through the Deep South. Then he visits New Orleans, Louisiana; Biloxi, Mississippi; Mobile and Montgomery, Alabama; and Atlanta, Georgia during his six weeks as a black man. That's a lot of traveling, if you ask us: if Griffin were running around today he'd be swimming in frequent flyer miles.
Because of all this traveling, Griffin is always on the move. We see him on buses, walking down highways, staying in hotels, or couch surfing with people he barely knows. This is great for us, but not so great for him.
Traveling means that we get to see lots of different aspects of race relations between blacks and whites in the South. Basically, it keeps things interesting. Unfortunately, what's interesting for us puts Griffin in danger. There is almost always some altercation when he's traveling from one place to another on the bus, let alone that whole hitchhiking incident which turned out to be one of the most disgusting parts of the whole book. Then, when he reaches his destination, Griffin has to lodge with possibly untrustworthy people or in gross, rundown hotels.
But we're pretty sure that Griffin doesn't just travel to entertain us and put himself in danger. He's a journalist after all. Griffin set out in the beginning of the book to expose the state of the black man in the South. If he only visited one state or one city, it would be easy to say that his experience wasn't representative of the whole South. But by going to various places, even places that claim they have good race relations, he was able to show the reality of life in the South for black people.
The Big Picture
If you're good little Shmoopos and Shmoopettes, you'll remember when the civil-rights movement begins. In some ways, it begins as early as the 1800's. But when you're talking about Martin Luther King Jr., or Rosa Parks, you're talking about the civil-rights movement that lasted from 1955 to 1968. Griffin undertakes his experiment in 1959: smack dab in the middle of the fray.
Whoa, let's rewind for a second. We're going to give you the hyperfast summary of why racism is worse in the South than in the North. We could write a whole textbook just on this, but right now we're gonna keep it simple. Black people were shipped from Africa to the American South in order to work on plantations growing tobacco, cotton, and sugarcane. This was called slavery. It beyond sucked.
After the American Civil War, black people were freed from slavery and the South entered a period called Reconstruction. This was awesome because it attempted to rebuild the South after the destruction caused by the war and right the wrongs done to black slaves. In case you were wondering why we don't have a happy ending, that's because Reconstruction ended shortly after the death of Abraham Lincoln and was replaced with Jim Crow. Okay, now you're up to speed.
You might think that, hey 1959 is four years after the civil-rights movement began, why aren't we seeing all of the action, protests, and violence that we associate with that time? Well, Griffin was one year too early for that. The Sit-ins will start in 1960, and in the next four years Martin Luther King will receive the Nobel Peace Prize, President Johnson will sign the Civil-Rights Act of 1964, and Martin Luther King will deliver his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington.
In other words, Griffin does this experiment on the cusp of history. Civil-rights leaders have already been working hard to improve the status of black people in America, and we know that because Griffin even meets some of them. But their efforts won't make it into the national eye until after Griffin leaves the Deep South.
It's a pretty unique time and place to pretend to be a black man. If Griffin tried earlier, things would have been worse, which is almost impossible to comprehend. But just a little bit later, and the struggle for equality would really be heating up. This setting lets us see just how far back people have come, and just how much farther they have to go. It's a little halfway point checkup.