In Search of Bisco by Erskine Caldwell

between Atlanta’s two extremes of conflict and harmony, there must be a good and sufficient reason for it. The reason is an obvious one. On one side is white-race economic and social frustration erupting in irrational violence in words and acts. On the other side is white-race tolerance and intellectual perception. The tug-of-war between the two forces has been long and arduous.
    The plight of the uneducated and prejudiced white Southerner, or poor buckra, as he was sarcastically named by the Negro long ago, is a pitiful one. This man of ill will is between forty and sixty years of age, barely literate due to lack of educational advantages in his youth, who is economically handicapped in life because he is now and has always been an unskilled laborer.
    One of the common evidences of the poor buckra’s frustration is his gullible eagerness and fanatical desire to be duped by inflammatory exhortations of the designing, scheming, rabble-rousing, opportunistic, professional politician. These are the shrewd politicians who pander to the poor buckra’s prejudice for the purpose of perpetuating themselves in office.
    Having little within himself in which he can take pride, and habitually frustrated by his awareness of his past, present, and future economic and social poverty, the poor buckra resents any achievement of the Negro and retaliates by doing anything within his cunning to restrict and deny the rights of all Negroes. It is not unusual for men of such prejudice to instigate wily and overt violence in an effort to enforce and perpetuate racial injustice and discrimination.
    The urbanized Atlanta Negro, in contrast to the frustrated poor buckra, is the fortunate beneficiary of the most extensive educational complex of any American city. This educational system has been segregated from the beginning, not by the desire of Negroes but by the discriminatory customs of the politically dominant white race.
    Atlanta’s many schools, colleges, and universities for Negroes came into existence as the result of determined efforts of Negroes themselves to provide higher education and professional training for Negro teachers, lawyers, and doctors barred from enrollment in the public and private institutions reserved exclusively for the white race in the State of Georgia. This determination to provide higher education for Negroes has made possible the present trained leadership of authentic spokesmen for civil rights in Atlanta, in Georgia, in the South, and throughout the nation.
    A forty-five-year-old professor of history in one of Atlanta’s Negro colleges has the calm confidence of an educated man who strives to attain an ideal by gentle persuasion and temperate argument. He is a tan-skinned octoroon, being of East Georgia Geechee and South Georgia white ancestry, and without bitterness toward fanatical advocates of white supremacy and racial discrimination.
    It took us a long time, he said, and we’re on our feet at last. But now that we’re on our way, there’s one thing we don’t want to forget. The progress of the Negro up to this point is due to the collaboration by the enlightened younger generation of whites and the Negro religious leaders. That’s why we were able to come to life after waiting a hundred years since slavery for what turned out to be nothing. And now we’ve got something for the first time in the Negro American’s history.
    I’m convinced that without the leadership of our ministers in the beginning we would’ve been the blind leading the blind. That means we would’ve made mistakes in judgment and walked right into damaging excesses. We’ve had little, if any, political leadership in all our history. But, fortunately for us, we did have the Negro preacher to guide us with his kind of experienced leadership when we began taking our first steps toward racial freedom.
    The Negro preacher I’m talking about was not always an educated man, but, one of the educated or not, he was a thoughtful man. He