Ray Sprigle was a journalist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for his reporting that Alabama Senator Hugo Black, newly appointed to the US Supreme Court, had been a member of the 20th-century Ku Klux Klan.
Sprigle's account of traveling in 1948 for a month in the Deep South while passing for black was first serialized by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in August of 1948. The series was adapted as a book, In the Land of Jim Crow, and published in 1949.