Grace Halsell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Halsell

Grace Halsell (May 7, 1923 – August 16, 2000) was an American journalist and writer.

Early life and education

The daughter of writer Harry H. Halsell, she studied at Texas Tech University from 1939 to 1942. During the 1940s, she was briefly married to Andy Fournier, the chief of detectives in the Fort Worth Police Department.

Career

Halsell worked for several newspapers between 1942 and 1965, including the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and the Washington bureau of the Houston Post. She covered both the Korean and Vietnam Wars as a reporter, and was a White House speech writer for President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1965 to 1968. She wrote 10 books, including the critically acclaimed and controversial Soul Sister for which she took pills used to alleviate pigmentation problems in order to darken skin and pass as black, and Journey to Jerusalem about Christian, Jewish, and Muslim families in the Holy Land.

Death

In 2000, she died in Washington, D.C. of complications from treatment for multiple myeloma. She bequeathed her papers to the Mary Couts Burnett Library at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. Some of her work is housed at Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.

Books

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Halsell#Books

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Grace Halsell, a journalist whose curiosity about a wider world led her to experience life on society's fringes by disguising herself as women of different races, died on Aug. 16 in Washington, where she lived. She was 77.

Inspired by John Howard Griffin's 1961 book Black Like Me, in which the author darkened his skin to pass as black, Ms. Halsell took pills that were used to alleviate pigmentation problems, supplemented by extensive tanning sessions, to cross the color barrier. Further transformed by a wig and dark contact lenses, she moved in 1968 first to Harlem and then to the Deep South, where at the height of the civil rights movement she took a job as a cleaning woman.

She wrote about this in her 1969 book, Soul Sister, in which she described the anonymity and degradation of being a black domestic in a world of white employers, one of whom tried to rape her. The book sold more than one million paperback copies and was translated into six languages.

Soul Sister was followed in 1973 by Bessie Yellowhair, based on her life on a Navajo reservation and as a American Indian nanny for a Los Angeles family, and in 1978 by The Illegals, in which she wrote of crossing the border with a group of Mexican immigrants. In the 1980's she lived undercover with a group of Christian fundamentalists.

The daughter of a West Texas cattleman, she was reared on her father's tales of frontier life on the Great Plains. I never felt anything I did was anything at all compared to his stories, she wrote in her 1996 autobiography, In Their Shoes.

After high school she accepted a job at The Avalanche-Journal, the only newspaper in Lubbock, Tex., where she attended a local college while working full time. She eventually studied anthropology at Columbia University and in 1945 became the first woman to cover the police beat at The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. While working as a reporter in the Washington bureau of The Houston Post in the mid-1960's she was recruited by President Lyndon B. Johnson for a secretarial position on his White House staff. When she told him she did not take dictation, she was assigned to write official statements and became the highest ranking woman on his staff during her three-year tenure.

She is survived by a brother and a sister, both of Texas.

Shortly after the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ms. Halsell left the White House for the journey she described as embracing the Other.

I wanted to strip myself to see who I was, to see if there was anything there, she said.