Before it was hip to be Black like me…
Ignatius Donnelly was a very progressive soul. Despite the fact that one of his best-selling
books dealt with Atlantis and all the speculative goodness that goes along with it, Donnelly was very much interested in human rights, particularly
those of Black Americans who were suffering through the beginning stages of
“Jim Crow” racism.
Dr. Huguet precedes the Griffin’s 1961 work Black Like Me, in which a white man
disguises himself as a Black man to experience the mid-20th century
racism of the American South and deals with this concept decades before the
racial renaissance of the 1960s, and deals with it in a manner that is
extremely similar. Using elements of the
paranormal, Donnelly’s 1891 novel magically transforms a White southerner into
the body of a local Black man and visa-versa.
Both receive life changing experiences, and both are transformed
mentally into a persona that the color of their skin seems to dictate.
The end result? Well…I’ll leave that for you to decide as to
whether or not any progress was made, or if there is a tinge of racial enmity
towards the Black man in the White man’s body.
Either way, Donnelly is approaching and dealing with these human issues well
before the topic of civil rights was chic…
The first edition of Doctor Huguet