In the autumn of 1959, a white Texan journalist named John Howard Griffin travelled across the Deep South of the United States disguised as a working class black man. Black Like Me is Griffin's own account of his journey. Published in book form two years later it revealed to a white audience the day-to-day experience of racism in segregation-era America.

Selling over five million copies, Black Like Me became one of the best-known accounts of race and racism in the 1960s. Embraced by some and fiercely criticised by others, its legacy sixty years on remains problematic, but Black Like Me nevertheless stands as a fascinating document of its time.