Henry W. Grady
This article needs additional citations for verification. (May 2008) |
Henry W. Grady | |
---|---|
Born | Henry Woodfin Grady May 24, 1850 |
Died | December 23, 1889 Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. | (aged 39)
Signature | |
Henry Woodfin Grady (May 24, 1850 – December 23, 1889) was an American journalist and
Early life
As a teenager, Henry Grady experienced fierce Civil War fighting in his home state of
Grady was a lifelong devoted member of the
Journalist and editor
Upon graduation, he held a series of brief journalistic jobs with the
In 1880, with $20,000 borrowed from
In the tumultuous decades following
The new South presents a perfect democracy...; a social system compact and closely knitted, less splendid on the surface, but stronger at the core; a hundred farms for every plantation, fifty homes for every palace; and a diversified industry that meets the complex needs of this complex age[8]
as he said in an 1886 speech in New York. His audience included
From 1882 to 1886, along with
Orator and spokesman for the "New South"
Grady was also praised for his great passion for political oratory (he supported Prohibition and a Georgia veterans' home for disabled or elderly Confederate soldiers), commitment to the new peace, and well-known sense of humor. To a large crowd in Boston, Grady said "I am a talker by inheritance: my father was an Irishman and my mother was a woman."[9]
That sense of humor got Grady through more than one difficult situation. Once at a banquet of northern elites, he was waxing eloquent about the brilliant prospects for northern investments in a New South determined to rise from the ashes of defeat. Grady spotted General
In another speech, Grady wanted to gently chastise his Southern audience for what he believed to be Georgia's economic shortcomings. Rather than pounding them with statistics, he entertained them with stories that made the points. He said:
I attended a funeral once in Pickens county in my State. This funeral was peculiarly sad. It was a poor "one gallus" fellow, whose breeches struck him under the armpits and hit him at the other end about the knee—he didn't believe in decollete clothes. They buried him in the midst of a marble quarry: they cut through solid marble to make his grave, yet a little tombstone they put above him was from Vermont. They buried him in the heart of a pine forest, and yet the pine coffin was imported from Cincinnati. They buried him within touch of an iron mine, and yet the nails in his coffin and the iron in the shovel that dug his grave were imported from Pittsburg. They buried him by the side of the best sheep-grazing country on the earth, and yet the wool in the coffin bands and the coffin bands themselves were brought from the North. The South didn't furnish a thing on earth for that funeral but the corpse and the hole in the ground. There they put him away and the clods rattled down on his coffin, and they buried him in a New York coat and a Boston pair of shoes and a pair of breeches from Chicago and a shirt from Cincinnati, leaving him nothing to carry into the next world with him to remind him of the country in which he lived, and for which he fought for four years, but the chill of blood in his veins and the marrow in his bones.
The
Grady's prestige reached such a height that he became the only non-member ever to adjourn the
White supremacy
Grady's conception of the New South was based on the social supremacy of whites over blacks, according to his own words: Grady stated in 1888, "the supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever, and the domination of the negro race resisted at all points and at all hazards, because the white race is the superior race... [This declaration] shall run forever with the blood that feeds Anglo-Saxon hearts".[10] This was not the first time that Grady had advocated for the supremacy of whites over blacks. In his 1887 speech to the State Fair of Texas in Dallas, Grady stated:[9]
Standing in the presence of this multitude, sobered with the responsibility of the message I deliver to the young men of the South, I declare that the truth above all others to be worn unsullied and sacred in your hearts, to be surrendered to no force, sold for no price, compromised in no necessity, but cherished and defended as the covenant of your prosperity, and the pledge of peace to your children, is that the white race must dominate forever in the South, because it is the white race, and superior to that race by which its supremacy is threatened.
Some argue other Henry Grady quotes paint a different picture. In December 1886, he opened his famous New South speech by repeating the words of Georgia Senator Benjamin H. Hill: "There was a South of slavery and secession -- that South is dead. There is a South of Union and freedom -- that South, thank God, is living, breathing, growing every hour."
Under Grady's editorial guidance, the Constitution wrote about lynching with levity, condoning and even encouraging it. One headline read, "The Triple Trapeze: Three Negroes Hung to a Limb of a Tree." Another rhymed, "Two Minutes to Pray Before a Rope Dislocated Their Vertebrae."[11] University of Massachusetts Amherst
Journalism Professor Kathy Roberts Forde, sees it this way: "Grady may have united Southern and Northern whites, but he did not unite the country. Rather, he excluded black Americans from the union of North and South and the national democratic project that union represented."[11]
Death
On December 12, 1889, Grady delivered a speech in Boston at Faneuil Hall titled "The Race Problem in the South". Grady was already ill, and the weather was terrible. His health worsened to the point that he barely made it back to Georgia. By the time he made it to the depot at Atlanta, he was too exhausted to appreciate the reception prepared for him and had to be shielded from the crowd and escorted home by his physician.
By December 23, he was diagnosed with
Legacy and honors
The city erected a
In 1931 Grady was the first person inducted into the Georgia Newspaper Hall of Fame, memorialized via a bust by artist Steffen Thomas.[19] During World War II the Liberty ship SS Henry W. Grady was built in Brunswick, Georgia and named in his honor.[20]
Grady's family grave site in Atlanta was desecrated in June 2020.[21]
-
Midtown High School in Atlanta (formerlyHenry W. Grady High School)
-
Henry Grady Hotel, 1924-1972
References
- ^ New Georgia Encyclopedia (about Henry W. Grady) Archived January 16, 2013, at the Wayback Machine.
- ISBN 9780910719001.
- ISBN 9781461661672.
- ^ Editorial Board (December 3, 2019). "Editorial: Mayor Bottoms, tear down this statue!". The Signal. Georgia State University.
- ^ Torpy, Bill (December 12, 2019). "OPINION: Hey, 'Grady Babies,' old Henry might not have liked you". Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Retrieved February 8, 2021.
- ^ "William Sammons Grady". United States Confederate Officers Card Index, 1861-1865. FamilySearch. pp. images 2547–2548.
- ^ "Mrs. Ann Grady Dies of Old Age". Atlanta Georgian. January 31, 1913. p. 4. Retrieved October 9, 2023.
- ^ Grady, "The New South," in Complete Orations and Speeches, p. 19.
- ^ a b Shurter, Edwin, ed. (1910). The Complete Orations and Speeches of Henry W. Grady. New York: Noble & Eldredge Hinds. pp. 2–3.
- ISBN 9781412815116. Retrieved January 16, 2011.
- ^ a b Roberts Forde, Kathy (February 15, 2019). "An editor and his newspaper helped build white supremacy in Georgia". The Conversation.
- ^ "Henry W. Grady Dead". Chicago Tribune. Atlanta, Georgia. December 24, 1889. p. 2. Retrieved April 30, 2021 – via Newspapers.com.
- ISBN 0-915430-00-2.
- ISBN 0-8173-0410-X.
- Newspapers.com.
- ^ "The Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906: A brief history" (PDF). National Center for Civil and Human Rights. August 2022. Retrieved October 26, 2023.
- ^ "117th Anniversary Commemoration of the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre". Creative Loafing. Retrieved October 26, 2023.
- ^ Rhone, Nedra (January 15, 2016). "Henry Grady school in Houston renamed because of Confederate ties". The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
- newspapers.com.
- ISBN 978-1-4766-1754-1. Retrieved December 9, 2017.
- ^ 11Alive Staff (June 13, 2020). "Gravesite of Henry W. Grady desecrated". WXIA-TV.
{{cite news}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
Further reading
- Clark, E. Culpepper. 2021. The Birth of a New South: Sherman, Grady, and the Making of Atlanta. Macon, GA: Macon University Press.
- Davis, Harold E, Henry Grady's New South: Atlanta, a Brave Beautiful City, 1990, Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press.
- Grady, Henry Woodfin. Complete Orations and Speeches. Edited by Edwin Dubois Shurter. 1910. South-West Press.Online at Hathi Trust.
- Nixon, Raymond, Henry W. Grady: Spokesman of the New South, 1943, NYC, Knopf.
- History of the University of Georgia, Thomas Walter Reed, Imprint: Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia, ca. 1949 pp.847-856
External links
- Works by or about Henry W. Grady at Internet Archive
- Henry W. Grady Archived October 23, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, New Georgia Encyclopedia online
- Henry W. Grady at Find a Grave
- Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library