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John Howard Griffin, from Black Like Me
(1961)

[A] "hate stare" drew my attention like a magnet. It came from a middle-aged, heavy-set, well-dressed white man. He sat a few yards away, fixing his eyes on me. Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you... I could not take my eyes from the man's face. I felt like saying: "What in God's name are you doing to yourself?"

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961)  Copyright © 1960, 1961, 1977 by John Howard Griffin.  Selected from the Library of America anthology.  See  Reporting  Civil  Rights:  American Journalism 1941-1963.