I first read John Howard Griffin’s “Black Like Me” in Mrs. Dickinson’s seventh-grade English class at Cascade Junior High in 1975.

I don’t know how often I have reread that book since, probably more than a dozen times.

Because it changed me.

Before I explain how, let me offer this brief introduction to people who aren’t familiar with the book or Griffin. After all, his book was published more than 60 years ago.

Griffin was a Catholic, a laity Carmelite monk concerned about social injustice in the early years of the Civil Rights Movement when segregation was legal. Determined to see and experience what he could about it firsthand, he dyed his skin black and traveled about the South in 1959.

His book was a sensation … and a source of sharp controversy.

Many Black people took offense at the fact that, only when this white dude — who could, and did return to his comfortable home in Texas when his trek was over — described his experiences as a pretend “bald-headed old Negro,” did white people start paying attention.

Well, he wasn’t. He was a middle-aged white guy.

Yes, and there were other criticisms, too, in many cases, justified.

What I want to talk about here, however, is one very human moment in that small book that rattled me then, and rattles me still.

At one point, a Black man living in a hovel with his wife and six young children somewhere in the swamps between Mobile and Montgomery, Alabama, takes him into his home for the night. Sharing this shack with the family, Griffin is undone by the generosity of his hosts and their grinding poverty. After the family drifts off to sleep on the floor around Griffin, he is compelled to go outside into the dark swamp and weep and reflect.

“I thought of my daughter, Susie, and of her fifth birthday today, the candles, the cake and party dress; and of my sons in their best suits,” Griffin wrote. “They slept now in clean beds in a warm house while their father, a bald-headed old Negro, sat in the swamps and wept, holding it in so he would not awaken the Negro children.

“It was thrown in my face. I saw it, not as a white man and not as a Negro, but as a human parent. Their children resembled mine in all ways except the superficial one of skin color, as indeed they resembled all children of all human beings. Yet this accident, this least important of all qualities, the skin pigment, marked them for inferior status. It became fully terrifying when I realized that if my skin were permanently black, [racism] would unhesitatingly consign my own children to this future.”

Griffin’s many epiphanies seem to culminate in this one concept of parental love and the injustice done to Black people in the United States. Not only did injustice and suffering constrict the existence of Black men and women in the South (and, perhaps, throughout all of the United States), such suffering also seeped into the way Black people loved as parents. Those whom they love, those whom they have brought into the world, are consigned to share in the suffering that the parents have already undertaken — and they are totally unable to staunch such suffering in their children.

Even so, I often ask myself, what sort of people gloat over another human being’s misery, and rage at his happiness? That’s the office of a devil.

It reminds me of what Robert F. Kennedy said in his 1968 speech on violence the day after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, and two months before his own murder in Los Angeles.

As Kennedy noted, there are many ways to kill a man without physically ending his life, including those employed by people who “tear at the fabric a man has clumsily woven for himself and for his children,” and refuse even to consider him a man.

I chalk it up to people at the bottom who, succumbing to the age-old appeal to seek harbor for their prejudices and hatreds in the “alien,” the “other,” appear to need someone to hate and blame for their problems.

And I hear and see too much of it even today.

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.