In Search of Bisco Read Online Free Page A

it. I’ve got too much sense to waste hard-earned money like that.
    I’ll tell you what I’d do with that money. I’d take it and rent me a house I’d be proud for my family to live in. And it wouldn’t be over there in the white folks’ part of town, neither. I’m just proud enough in my own right to segregate myself over here on this side with my own people.

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    I T WOULD NOT BE unusual for an unsuspecting stranger in Bisco Country to find himself feeling sympathetic toward the conviction of a native-born white Southerner who argues, with all evidence of sincerity in voice and word, that he is the best friend the Negro American will ever have in this world. He is evidently convinced, and he would have a stranger believe likewise, that the Negro himself knows by experience, and willingly accepts the fact, that his only opportunity for happiness and security is possible when he lives in segregated social, political, and economic isolation.
    Either with or without a twinge of sympathy for such a conviction, a first-time visitor soon becomes aware that this point of view of the racist-minded white Southerner is traditional in the Deep South. It is a state of mind that has dominated Southern life for many generations. From the beginning, the feudal attitude was motivated by assumed racial superiority and indisputable economic selfishness; and later, shamed by the appalling evidence of feudal treatment, the Southern attitude was slightly adjusted to provide for fashionable expressions of pity and compassion for the Negro. Nevertheless, in the years following the Civil War, and regardless of motives, well-meaning or otherwise, the Negro still had no choice other than to exist in a modified form of slavery.
    For the next hundred years in the agricultural South, and in particular wherever cotton was grown, slavery by intimidation continued to be the way of life for the Negro. By necessity working for token wages, he was unable to earn more than a mere minimum of food, clothing, and housing. Thus after freedom from a century of physical bondage, he was immediately enslaved in economic bondage for another century.
    During all this time, Negroes were looked upon as being hostages of fortune or predestined orphans of inferior parentage who should be forever grateful for being protected from a hostile outside world. Payment for protection by their self-appointed benefactors was required to be rendered in groveling obeisance and uncomplaining servitude. Withholding food and clothing or the use of the lash could be the punishment for failure to make payment. And when this was not enough to bring about compliance, nightriders or the Ku Klux Klan could be called upon to enforce rule by fear.
    A new generation of Negroes, educated and aware of their human rights, came of age in the Racial Sixties and rebelled against continuation of imposed isolation and discrimination. This awakening of a once docile race is disturbing to traditional attitudes of Southern whites from South Carolina to Louisiana. Century-old traditions are threatened with extinction.
    As a consequence, one white Southerner will become a self-styled nigger-hater and white supremist; another, more politically astute, will cater to a calculated moderation of racial prejudice; and others, who claim a majority, will loudly proclaim that they know what is best for the child-like Negroes and vow to guard them against dangerous agitation by outsiders who have no understanding of a situation indigenous to the South. Though presently outnumbered, there are men of perception and foresight throughout the Deep South who are striving to make it possible for the Negro American to obtain his rightful first-class citizenship.
    There is a wide belt of fertile mulatto soil lying diagonally across the central region of South Carolina between the northern sand hills and the southern coastal plain. This rich land was first put under cultivation in the eighteenth century by Gullah slaves