Excerpted From The Atlanta Constitution Managing Editor Henry W. Grady’s 1886 “The New South” speech:
In speaking to the toast with which you have honored me, I accept the term, “The New South,” as in no sense disparaging to the old. Dear to me, sir, is the home of my childhood and the traditions of my people. I would not, if I could, dim the glory they won in peace and war, or by word or deed take aught from the splendor and grace of their civilization — never equalled and, perhaps, never to be equalled in its chivalric strength and grace. There is a New South, not through protest against the old, but because of new conditions, new adjustments and, if you please, new ideas and aspirations. It is to this that I address myself, and to the consideration of which I hasten lest it become the Old South before I get to it. Age does not endow all things with strength and virtue, nor are all new things to be despised. The shoemaker who put over his door “John Smith’s shop. Founded in 1760,” was more than matched by his young rival across the street who hung out this sign: “Bill Jones. Established 1886. No old stock kept in this shop.”
“I want to say to General Sherman — who is considered an able man in our parts, though some people think he is a kind of careless man about fire — that from the ashes he left us in 1864 we have raised a brave and beautiful city; that somehow or other we have caught the sunshine in the bricks and mortar of our homes, and have builded therein not one ignoble prejudice or memory.”
“But in all this what have we accomplished? What is the sum of our work? We have found out that in the general summary the free negro counts more than he did as a slave. We have planted the schoolhouse on the hilltop and made it free to white and black. We have sowed towns and cities in the place of theories and put business above politics. We have challenged your spinners in Massachusetts and your ironmakers in Pennsylvania. We have learned that the $400 million annually received from our cotton crop will make us rich, when the supplies that make it are home-raised. We have reduced the commercial rate of interest from 24 to 6 percent and are floating 4 percent bonds. We have learned that one northern immigrant is worth 50 foreigners and have smoothed the path to southward, wiped out the place where Mason and Dixon’s line used to be, and hung our latch-string to you and yours.”
Excerpted from a 1948 column by The Atlanta Constitution’s Editor Ralph McGill:
It was just after midnight. I had finished packing and was lying down in my hotel room at St. Paul, Minn., wishing sleep would hurry up and come … .
The telephone rang. It was a St. Paul reporter.
“This is going to be embarrassing to you,” he said, “coming as it does on the heels of your speech. But we want to ask you about the Ku Klux Klan forcing the presidents of the Negro institutions in Georgia to leave a university meeting.”
Well, there I was, lying there a long way from home and I had to give answers to something about which I had just learned.
A few hours before I had asked the indulgence of a large audience … and had said I wanted to depart from my text to talk a little bit about the South.
I told them I was proud of the South and of my State. I told them of the fine people who shared every good wish and desire for goodwill Americans in all other regions had. I told them the people of the South were for civil rights, even though we disagreed with methods proposed by the Messrs. Truman, Dewey and Wallace. I had talked of our progress and our desire to have our farmers make incomes as high as those of Minnesota and Iowa and the other great states of the Middle West. I told of our determination that our children, one day, should have as much an opportunity in school as theirs. But, most of all, I asked them to believe that despite occasional evidence to the contrary the people of the South were not willfully mean and violent, but were as eager to make a great America as they.
And then, two hours later, there I was with a query about the Ku Klux Klan at Milledgeville, Ga.
I told him that those who engaged in the stupid affront to decency and the name of the State, were the usual assortment of mentally arrested, natural-born jerks and oafs to be found in any community, St. Paul included. I explained that the three Negroes were much more valuable Georgians than the whole membership of the group, which had made jackasses of themselves, their city and State. I said that if all the membership of the Ku Klux Klan would leave Georgia the moral and intellectual level of the State would be raised considerably.
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