Richard Ward's shoeshine man character, Burt Wilson, was based on Sterling Williams, a one-legged shoe-shiner in New Orleans. Although Burt only appears in a couple of scenes, Sterling played a major part in Griffin's story and was featured almost as much as Howard himself in the book.
During their night together, Frank Newcomb tells Griffin that black people in the south aren't allowed to have guns, or even bullets. This fact is one of the revolutionary aspects of the Black Panther movement that was born a couple of years later in Oakland California, when the founders realized that they had a constitutional right to bear arms in self-defense, and proceeded to do just that.
Although the film does not follow Griffin's life after the book, he suffered a great deal from both public backlash, and the psychological side effects from his experiences, including the struggle with his guilt about being able to escape his situation and return to the privileged world he came from.
Roscoe Lee Brown plays the character Christopher, who drunkenly rages at the other black customers in the diner for their lack of education and culture. In the book, the episode took place on a bus where Griffin and the other black passengers were trapped by Christopher's behavior. He was also described as being overtly homosexual.