Journalist
Upon graduation, he held a series of brief journalistic jobs with the Rome Courier, the Atlanta Herald, and the New York Herald. After working in New York, Grady returned to the South as a reporter-editor for the Atlanta Constitution.
In 1880, with borrowed money, Grady bought a one-fourth interest in the paper and began a nine-year career as one of Georgia's most celebrated journalists. On the business end, he quickly built the newspaper into the state's most influential, with a national circulation of 120,000.
In the tumultuous decades following Reconstruction, when hatreds lingered and conservative whites worked to re-establish white supremacy, Grady offered a vision of a New South in which the past was put to rest:
"There was a South of slavery and secession - that South is dead. There is now a South of union and freedom - that South, thank God, is living, breathing, and growing every hour," he said in an 1886 speech in New York.
His audience included J. P. Morgan and H. M. Flagler at Delmonico's Restaurant at a meeting of the New England Society of New York.
Grady popularized an antithesis between the “old South” which “rested everything on slavery and agriculture, unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth,” and a “new south” – “thrilling with the consciousness of growing power and prosperity”. From 1882 to 1886, along with Nathaniel E. Harris, he promoted the creation in Atlanta of the Georgia Institute of Technology, a state vocational-education school to train workers for new industries.
Read more about this topic: Henry W. Grady
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