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When I moved to Charlotte, NC, in 1986, I visited local museums to learn about the city. One museum caught my eye – the Levine Museum of the New South. Its permanent exhibit – Cotton Fields to Skyscrapers – “uses Charlotte and its 13 surrounding counties as a case study to illustrate the profound changes in the South since the Civil War.” The “New South” – a term Atlanta newspaperman Henry W. Grady coined in a speech to the New England Society of New York on December 21, 1886 – is familiar to many American history teachers. In his speech, Grady, the first southerner to speak to the Society, claimed that the old South, the South of slavery and secession, no longer existed and that southerners were happy to witness its demise. He refused to apologize for the South’s role in the Civil War, saying, “the South has nothing to take back.” Instead, the dominant theme of Grady’s speech, according to New South historian Edward L. Ayers, “was that the New South had built itself out of devastation without surrendering its self-respect.” Tragically, Grady and most of his fellow white southerners believed maintaining their self-respect required maintaining white supremacy.

Explanation:

Grady, then the 46-year-old editor-publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, was one of the leading advocates of the New South creed. In New York, he won over the crowd of prominent businessmen, including J.P. Morgan and H.M. Flagler, with tact and humor. He praised Abraham Lincoln, the end of slavery, and General William T. Sherman, whom he called “an able man” although a bit “careless with fire.” Grady reassured the northern businessmen that the South accepted her defeat. He was glad “that human slavery was swept forever from American soil” and the “American Union saved.” He urged northern investment in the South as a means of cementing the reunion of the war-torn nation. He claimed progress in racial reconciliation in the South and begged forbearance by the North as the South wrestled with “the problem” of African Americans’ presence in the South. Grady asked whether New England would allow “the prejudice of war to remain in the hearts of the conquerors when it has died in the hearts of the conquered?” Grady’s audience cheered his call for political and economic reunion – albeit at the cost of African American rights. The term “New South” was used in the 20th century to refer to other concepts. Moderate governors of the late 20th century – including Terry Sanford of North Carolina, Jimmy Carter of Georgia, and George W. Bush of Texas – were called New South governors because they combined pro-growth policies with so-called “moderate” views on race. Others used the phrase to summarize modernization in southern cities such as Charlotte, Atlanta, Richmond, and Birmingham, and the region’s increasing economic and demographic diversity. However, all uses of the term have suggested the intersection between economic development and racial justice in the South during Reconstruction, the Jim Crow Era, the Civil Rights Era and today.

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