What Students Need to Know About the New South

Abstract

In 1886 Henry Woodfin Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, exhorted a group of New York businessmen to consider investment opportunities in the New South. The region, he proclaimed, was ready to forget the late unpleas antness and embrace the modern in dustrial spirit. Just over a century later, it is appropriate to ask: How was Grady's New South? Had southerners, as the editor im plied, moved beyond the animosities of war? Was the cotton kingdom about to give way to a new in dustrial era? Could black and white citizens live in harmony? Had political and social leader ship changed so drastically that such a transformation from antebellum traditions was pos sible? Students today must ap preciate the crucial nature of political, economic, and social developments in the postbel lum South if they are to under. stand subsequent events of the twentieth century. They need to identify the entrenched leaders of the region and recognize how these men gained and consolidated their power. They should realize that the growth of industry usually meant low-wage, labor-intensive factories that did little to promote economic growth. Most southern laborers continued to till the soil (sometimes their own, often that of another). Finally, students must understand the process that relegated southern blacks to second-class citizenship. Without such an awareness, a study of modern America, and especially the Civil Rights movement, remains hollow. To comprehend the signifi cance of struggle is to recognize the restraining forces. One historian, C. Vann Woodward, has spent his career crafting a focus for the late nine teenth-century South. [An impor tant and insightful analysis of the intellectual tradition that Woodward inherited, the political and social climate in which he came of age, his own concern for social justice, and