Imagine today an award-winning white reporter from a big city newspaper posing as an African American for an investigative piece. Would New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman be willing to don blackface in the hopes of scoring a Pulitzer prize?
Can you even imagine the backlash?
Well in the fall of 1970 one crackerjack reporter for a bustling metropolis newspaper did just that.
The newspaper was The Daily Planet and the ace reporter was Lois Lane.
Lois Lane number 6 was published in Nov 1970 the cover art by Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson. The 36 page comic book sold for 15 cents and featured the Lois Lane Story “I am Curious( Black) the issue explores race relations in Metropolis as Lois transforms into a black woman to write a story about “Little Africa.” Her new skin color changes society’s perception of her and she realizes the struggles of everyday life as a minority.
One afternoon in November of 1970 I was perusing the overstuffed magazines rack at Katz’s Candy store on my way home from high school. Being 15, I now passed over my once favorite Little Lotta and Richie Rich comic books and headed straight for Tiger Beat for the latest dish on Bobby Sherman. But before I had a chance to flip through the teen magazine and ogle at a groovy pin-up of Davy Jones, I was distracted by an unusual issue of Lois Lane.
The glossy comic book cover announced “I Am Curious (Black)” and curious I was. The illustration depicted Lois Lane stepping into Superman’s special Plastimold machine and stepping out as a Black woman.
Great Caesar’s Ghost, lily-white Lois Lane was a Sistah with a ‘fro.
Black Like Me
The theory of 1961’s Black Like Me was to comprehend the lives of black people, John Howard Griffin had darkened his skin to become black His travels of a black man gave an unflinching look at the segregated era.
I had to laugh because only two days earlier I had handed in my book report on Black Like Me for Mrs. Schaeffer’s English class.
The groundbreaking book written almost a decade earlier was the true account of journalist John Howard Griffin’s travels into the Deep South. The chestnut-haired, white man who deliberately darkened his skin to look like an African American, spent six weeks traveling through the segregated south, where drinking fountains restaurants, and lunch counters still carried signs reading whites only.
Driven by his rage at the injustice of racism, he transformed himself to better understand the black experience. “The only way I could see to bridge the gap between us was to become a Negro,” Griffin wrote in 1961.
He had anticipated some prejudice and hardship, but he was shocked at the extent of it. The little courtesies and amenities that he, as a white man, had taken for granted were now prohibited to him
Lois Lane transforms into a Black Woman November 1970
Now Superman’s girlfriend was on a similar mission, to expose the stain of racial injustice and realize the struggles of everyday life as a minority by transforming herself into a black woman.
Lois Lane didn’t have to travel to the Deep South to examine racial injustice. She merely had to go to Little Africa, the black Harlem of Metropolis to do an explosive expose. Perhaps inspired by that summer’s violent race riots in Augusta GA and Asbury Park, NJ, Lois Lane got woke.
Lois Lane Comic November 1970
At the Daily Planet Lois excitedly tells her colleague Clark Kent that editor Perry White gave her the assignment of a lifetime. To get the inside story of Little Africa! Certain that this investigative story is the ticket for her scoring a Pulitzer Prize for “telling it like it is!” she boasts she’d provide “the nitty gritty” that “No newspaper ever printed before!”
Um, except they had,
Lois was scooped 22 years earlier by another real-life newspaper reporter in 1948!
In The Land Of Jim Crow
Ray Sprigle’s book In the Land of Jim Crow was an account of his journey through the South passing as a Black Man for 30 days. Before it was a book it was a serialized newspaper story
More than a decade before John Howard Griffin’s 1961 Black Like Me was published, Ray Sprigle a white journalist from Pittsburgh had a similar idea. In 1948 he journeyed through Jim Crow deep south passing as a Black Man for 30 days, eventually writing about it in a 21-part series for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
Ray Sprigle traveled not as himself but as James Rayel Crawford a light-skinned black man with a shaved head who told his sources he was collecting information for the NAACP.
He was so far ahead of the curve yet his actions have been forgotten.
It was a riveting story that had the whole country talking about race in 1948. Syndicated coast to coast in white newspapers his vivid descriptions and outrage at the “iniquitous Jim Crow system” shocked the North, enraged the South, and created a national dialogue.
Little Africa
Lois Lane Comic Book November 1970
Clutching her reporter’s notebook, Lois hails a cab to take her to the Black ghetto of Metropolis.
Confident that everyone will open up to her providing her with “the nitty gritty” she needs to write her piece, she is gobsmacked when they turn their backs on her. No one, not even school kids wants to talk to a white woman. Confounded she wonders, “How can I break through this wall of suspicion?”
Whitey
When Lois accidentally stumbles into a street meeting, overhearing a black man denounce white people for continuing to discriminate against black people she is mortified.
“Never Forget, she’s whitey!” he says angrily pointing to Lois. “She will allow us to polish her shoes and clean her floors…but refuses to admit us to her lily white schools!…Its Okay with her if we leave these rat infested slums. If we don’t move next door to her. That’s why she’s our enemy!”
Lois Lane Comic Book November 1970
Eyes downcast our intrepid reporter feels not only dejected but defeated.
Becoming Black
From White to Black Lois Lane November 1970
Superman comes to her rescue!
“The only way I could see to bridge the gap between us was to become a Negro,” Griffin writes.
The man of Steel has the perfect plan how to help Lois out. He has a machine that would temporarily transform her into a Black Woman, so she can better speak with the residents of Little Africa.
While John Griffin shaved his hair in Black Like Me and went to a dermatologist to help darken his skin with a medication usually given to victims of vitiligo, Lois relied on a special Kryptonian machine to transform her
Superman transports her to his Fortress of Solitude, where she steps into the “Plastimold” machine. The machine was an invention created by the Kryptonian surgeon Dahr-Nel. It adjusts the molecular structures of cell tissues.
Lois suddenly emerges many shades darker, her straight raven-colored hair having been changed into a curly brown afro.
But the catch is she’s only Black for one day.
Just as Griffin reasoned “No white man could truly understand what it was like to be black because black people never tell the truth to outsiders,” Lois is convinced with her new black skin and afro she will “really be accepted! and “Learn the inside story of what it means to be black!”
The new, “black” Lois Lane now lives life like a black person, starting off with a taxi not slowing down for her. Lois Lane Comic Book November 1970
Of course, it doesn’t take long for Lois to “get” the Black experience.
She hails a cab, but this time it zooms straight by her refusing to pick her up. A lightbulb goes off in her head “So…THIS is the way it is! The color of my money isn’t good enough.”
The cab driver gives Lois her first lesson in the meaning of black!
White Like Me
Lois eventually transforms back to her white self when “Plastimold” effects wear off. She’s certain she got a prize-winning story.
For all her excellent reporting, poor Lois missed out on the Pulitzer Prize that year. The award went to Jimmy Hoagland of The Washington Post for his coverage of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.
Apartheid trumped Little Africa in 1970.
Lois could easily shed her color and go back to the safety and privilege of white America. Not everyone has that chance.
Today it’s less about changing the color of one’s skin but questioning the superiority and privileges of one’s whiteness.