Ray Sprigle was a Pulitzer Prize

Pulitzer Prize

The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...

 winning journalist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, also known simply as the "PG," is the largest daily newspaper serving metropolitan Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.-Early history:...

.

Sprigle graduated from Ohio State University

Ohio State University

The Ohio State University, commonly referred to as Ohio State, is a public research university located in Columbus, Ohio. It was originally founded in 1870 as a land-grant university and is currently the third largest university campus in the United States...

. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Reporting

Pulitzer Prize for Reporting

The Pulitzer Prize for Reporting was awarded from 1917 to 1947.-Winners:*1917: Herbert Bayard Swope, New York World, for articles which appeared October 10, October 15 and from November 4 daily to November 22, 1916, inclusive, entitled, "Inside the German Empire."*1918: Harold A...

 in 1938 for a series of articles in the Post-Gazette proving that Hugo Black

Hugo Black

Hugo Lafayette Black was an American politician and jurist. A member of the Democratic Party, Black represented Alabama in the United States Senate from 1927 to 1937, and served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1937 to 1971. Black was nominated to the Supreme...

, newly appointed to the United States Supreme Court by Franklin Roosevelt, had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan

Ku Klux Klan

Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...

. The evidence that Sprigle uncovered included, among other things, a photostatic

Photostat machine

The Photostat machine, or Photostat, was an early projection photocopier created in the 1900s by the Photostat Corporation; "Photostat" - which was originally a trademark of the company - is also used to refer to the similar machines produced by the Rectigraph Company.-Background:The growth of...

 copy of a letter from Black written on the stationery of the Alabama

Alabama

Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...

 Klan asking to resign from the organization.

In May of 1948, Sprigle, using the name "James Crawford", took a thirty day, four thousand mile trip through the Deep South

Deep South

The Deep South is a descriptive category of the cultural and geographic subregions in the American South. Historically, it is differentiated from the "Upper South" as being the states which were most dependent on plantation type agriculture during the pre-Civil War period...

 pretending to be black. He was supported in this investigation by the NAACP and accompanied by John Wesley Dobbs

John Wesley Dobbs

John Wesley Dobbs , an African American civic and political leader, was often referred to as unofficial 'mayor' of Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia....

. He wrote a series of articles based on the journey, which appeared on the front page of the Post-Gazette under the title I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days. The articles formed the basis of Sprigle's 1949 book In the Land of Jim Crow. Sprigle's work predated the more famous John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin was an American journalist and author much of whose writing was about racial equality. He is best known for darkening his skin and journeying through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to experience segregation in the Deep South in 1959...

's similar investigation, reported in Griffin's book Black Like Me

Black Like Me

Black Like Me is a non-fiction book by journalist John Howard Griffin first published in 1961. Griffin was a white native of Mansfield, Texas and the book describes his six-week experience travelling on Greyhound buses throughout the racially segregated states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama...

, by over a decade.