James Whitmore filming Black Like Me, Tampa, Florida. 1964
“For many people in America, the book and then the film Black Like Me, in which a white journalist traveled the South in blackface, learning what it was like to be black in a segregated land, was a revelation.
Many whites had no idea of the daily indignities and the constant
strain visited by racism. Today blackface is rightly taboo. But Fred
Astaire’s homage to the great Bojangles and Black Like Me — those are
the exceptions to that rule.”
