Background
Sprigle, Ray was born on August 14, 1886 in Akron, Ohio, United States. Son of Emanuel P. and Sarah Ann (Hoover) Sprigle.
Sprigle, Ray was born on August 14, 1886 in Akron, Ohio, United States. Son of Emanuel P. and Sarah Ann (Hoover) Sprigle.
Student Ohio State University University, 1905-1906.
The evidence that Sprigle uncovered included, among other things, a photostatic copy of a letter from Black written on the stationery of the Alabama Klan asking to resign from the organization. In May 1948, Sprigle, using the name "James Crawford", took a thirty-day, four-thousand-mile trip through the Deep South pretending to be black. He was supported in this investigation by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and accompanied by John Wesley Dobbs.
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 Sprigle"s work predated the more famous John Howard Griffin"s similar investigation, reported in Griffin"s book Black Like Maine, by over a decade.
He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1938 for a series of articles in the Post-Gazette proving that Hugo Black, newly appointed to the United States Supreme Court by Franklin Roosevelt, had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Married Agnes Marie Trimmer, December 29, 1922.
