#And let's get rid of Henry W. Grady's name in/on/around anything in Georgia please

[clairemiller86]

From The Conversation: 

In Atlanta, a large crowd of demonstrators recently gathered at a statue of Henry W. Grady, the late 19th-century American journalist and orator who championed white supremacy. They chanted “We can’t breathe!” and stood on the statue’s terraced pedestal with signs reading “Black lynching must go!” and “Black lives matter.”

Grady is typically depicted as a brilliant editor and a “mild racist” who helped build modern Atlanta. My take is different. Grady used his newspaper as a political tool to help kill off Reconstruction’s biracial experiment in democracy. In its place, he helped create a profoundly anti-democratic, white supremacist social order that lasted in the South until the Civil Rights act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Today’s young protesters are forcing a reappraisal of Grady’s legacy.

In December, Georgia State University’s student newspaper published an open letter to Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, asking her to “tear down this statue” in reference to the Grady statue in the diverse university’s neighborhood.

In February, students at Henry W. Grady High School in Atlanta petitioned the school board to give the school a name that doesn’t “honor a segregationist.”

And last week, as protests against police brutality consumed the country, the student newspaper at the University of Georgia ran an op-ed calling for the school to rename its Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, where the motto is “We are Grady.” A petition demands that the Board of Regents “Rename Grady” to honor Charlayne Hunter-Gault, a journalist who helped integrate the university in 1961.