Article on Atlanta and the "new South ", 1974

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Atlanta [illegible]

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For a century now, Americans have heard announcements of a "New South," only to discover that the new versions has have been very much like the old./→ Henry Grady, the great Atlanta editor of the late 1800s, announced a New South where industrialization would replace the old cotton plantation economy. Cotton mills did spring up in across the Southland, but as a great historian of the region (W.J. Cash) noted, the effect was to transplant the plantation system from the cotton field to the cotton mill. The owner of the new mill was the new aristocrat, the white working class was the new labor force, and the blacks stayed behind on the farm as tenants or house servants. Nothing was done to break the tradition of unforfeitable white supremacy.

Another New South was seen by some in the Populist movement of the 1890s, which challenged the railroads, the banks, and the other commercial giants of the period in the name of the poor, impoiv impoverished Southern farmer. But Populism, before many years, was transformed into virulent racism. And in almost every Southern state, the so-called Populist leaders made their peace with the business circles of the time and ended up delivering their gullible constituents empty oratory instead of social reform.

In the 1930s, some believed the spending program of the New Deal would mean a New South, too. The Roosevelt administration did deliver the Tennessee Valley Authority, to the horror of the private utilities, and it the TVA did begin to provide cheap power and the possibility of industrial development to the northern, hiller regio part of the South. The various New Deal agencies pumped huge amounts of money into the region, which a federal report labeled as "the Nation's Number One economic problem." But nothing was done to disturb the racial caste system of the Southland, and without that change, no really New South was possible.

Last edit over 1 year ago by Greg14
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My thesis today, however, is that the real New South has indeed arrived in our time, [illegible] All of America has changed markedly since the [illegible] 1940s. [illegible] But I would suggest that the degree of deep and liberating change which has come to the South is without parallel in any other part of the nation. [illegible]

On the civil rights front, a second Reconstruction, one I am convinced is far more durable than the one which followed the Civil War, has come to the South. De jure racial segregation has fallen, and in its wake a great deal of informal segregation has ended. If there ever was [illegible] Court decisions, Presidents of the US--especially the Southerner Lyndon Johnson,--the young Freedom Riders and other civil rights activists, and most importantly black Southerners themselves deserve credit for the 20th Century Reconstruction. The places where they did it now sound like the honor roll of some great war--Montgomery and Albany and St. Augustine and Birmingham and Selma and the March on Washington.

Less heralded were the confrontations at hundreds of dusrty crossroads and voting registrars' offices across the South, as black people put their jobs and homes, even their lives, in the line. I do not think it is any exaggeration to say this was surely one of the most nobly conducted struggles for freedom in human history. And it was victorious.

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In my judgment, the victory of the Southern blacks has also served to make their white brothers and sisters free. In matters of the spirit, of the economy, and politics, all Southerners were bound to a bitter past [illegible]and bleak→future was long as a third of the region's people were denied fundamental freedoms and economic opportunities. And today there are many who believe that the South, if it has had further to go than to North in racial equality, is moving there far more rapidly, and indeed may show the way to the rest of America. One explanation is that Southerners were always frank about their[illegible] racial prejudices, as opposed to Northerners who preached toleration but practiced subtle discrimination. As one Charleston attorney explained it to me:

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The Southerner always admitted he hated "niggers." Northerners loved blacks only collectively, not individually. Discrimination in the South was total and absolute in every area--but no one ever claimed it was otherwise. In the North, the claim was that blacks were human. But after that assertion, there was the systematic exclusion. One example of that has been the built-in discrimination in the labor unions of the North. But now watch the explosion of skilled Negroes in the South--without built-in unionization to stop their great skills.

Because the 2 civilization and national culture of the nation passed this region by, it was left in a more primitive, uneducated state. [illegible] And thus it is equipped to make its necessary revolution. The South has enough Negroes to force it to do its thing right. And the result will be a big/black/culture, as part of the whole.

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On the economic front, a century of literal and grinding depression in the South has ended with the rapid shift from the agrarianism once so distinctive to the region to a new economy based on industry and marked by urbanization.

For those of you from [illegible] outside the region, who may not be familiar with its economic history, I think a quick flashback /to/the/way/things/were/ may be in order. During theits "Civil War century," as Tennessee Senator Howard Baker once described it to me, the region remained overwhelmingly rural and bound to the land. There were a few spots of major industry, but essentially the South remained [illegible] agricultural in the very era that the rest of [illegible] America was industrializing and urbanizing. In 1930 the vast majority of the South's people lived a in the rural, backward areas, and the regional per capita income was only half the national level. SDuring the 1920s the boll weevil ravaged Southern cotton crops and then the Great Depression struck the region like a sledgehammer. One Southern historian, Thomas D. Clark, has written:

In 1935 vast areas of the South were reduced to shabbiness. Farmsteads were cluttered and run-down, reflecting the deepest state of poverty. Rusting implements and vehicles were scattered about in disarray of abandonment. Barns, outhouses, fences, and grounds sagged under the weight of sun and time...Agricultural backwardness, iuf if not complete failure, was stamped upon homesteads with as indelibly as the thrust of the hills and the slash of the streams. ...Between Charleston and Natchez.... "nigger house h shabbiness" was more descriptive than Tara, Rosehill, or Afton Villa splendor.

/_ Consider another fact: it was not until the 1940s that the the value of property tax assessments in Georgia reached the level they had had [illegible] before the Civil War. The date of the 1940s, of course, is significant, because it was World War II that provided the great catalyst for economic growth in the South. Then countless military camps were set up in the region and Washington sent billions

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for construction or expanding chemical, ammunition, and shipbuilding industries in the region. And the surge of growth that started then has yet to abate. Per capita income has continued to rise -- though it still lags [illegible] behind the national level; -- millions whose fathers worked on hardscrabble farms now have decent factory jobs, and there has been a constant, dramatic movement from marginal rural areas to metropolitan centers.

Now, for the first time in its history, the South has developed cities of distinction, the nerve centers that any society needs for advanced economic and intellectual activity. I challenge you to name for me a more dynamic city in America today than Atlanta, unless it be other Southern metropolises like Houston or Miami. Think of the hotel where we are today; it is but the newest→ example of the wave of imaginative urban architecture that has come to this city. "No other city of the region," one economist noted 14 years ago, "occupies or duplicates Atlanta's role as the spark plug, catalyst, generator, service center, financier, clearing house, trading point, policy maker and pace setter for the South's new economy." What he said then is even truer in the 1970s. In 1935, the total deposits in Atlanta's banks were $200 million; by 1960, they were $1.6 billion, and when I last checked in 1972, they were $4.4 billion. In the 1920s, Georgia financier Ernest Woodruff had been obliged to go to New York for the $25 million he [illegible] needed to buy Coca-Cola; since 1970, a syndicate of the Atlanta banks has loaned Delta Airlines alone $520 million.

I don't want to belabor the point of [illegible] change in the urban South, and Atlanta in particular, but I think you would be amused to know that John Gunther, at the end of World War II, could work up no greater praise for Atlanta's economy than to note that "its pace is almost as quick as, say, that of Rochester or Akron." In a 1945 Saturday Evening Post article, George Sessions Perry described Atlanta as "a hot-bread, boiled-greens, fried-chicken-and-gravy town" with a [illegible]

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