Joel Chandler Harris' life of Henry W. Grady including his writings and speeches
History
Joel Chandler Harris' life of Henry W. Grady including his writings and speeches
Grady, Henry Woodfin, 1850-1889
Each gets the same accommodation
for the same money. There is no collision. There is no irritation or
suspicion. Nowhere on earth is there kindlier feeling, closer sympathy,
or less friction between two classes of society than between the whites
and blacks of the South to-day. This is due to the fact that in the
adjustment of their relations they have been practical and sensible.
They have wisely recognized what was essential, and have not sought to
change what was unchangeable. They have yielded neither to the fanatic
nor demagogue, refusing to be misled by the one or misused by the other.
While the world has been clamoring over their differences they have been
quietly taking counsel with each other, in the field, the shop, the
street and cabin, and settling things for themselves. That the result
has not astonished the world in the speediness and the facility with
which it has been reached, and the beneficence that has come with it, is
due to the fact that the result has not been freely proclaimed. It has
been a deplorable condition of our politics that the North has been
misinformed as to the true condition of things in the South. Political
greed and passion conjured pestilential mists to becloud what the
lifting smoke of battle left clear. It has exaggerated where there was a
grain of fact, and invented where there was none. It has sought to
establish the most casual occurrences as the settled habit of the
section, and has sprung endless jeremiades from one single disorder, as
Jenkins filled the courts of Christendom with lamentations over his
dissevered ear. These misrepresentations will pass away with the
occasion that provoked them, and when the truth is known it will come
with the force of a revelation to vindicate those who have bespoken for
the South a fair trial, and to confound those who have borne false
witness against her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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