He began his project of being a Negro, while he was reading a chart about suicide rates. This chart displayed that the Southern Negro man had a rapidly increasing rate of suicide, because they could not see a reason to go on as the second class citizens that they had become due to their skin color. The whites thought that the Negroes had it made since they had given them “so much” during reconstruction. Griffin realized that the only way to really see the truth about what the Negroes had to endure from day to day was to become a “Negro” himself.