A few years ago I told, in a speech, of a burial in Pickens county, Georgia. The grave was dug through solid marble, but the marble headstone came from Vermont. It was in a pine wilderness, but the pine coffin came from Cincinnati. An iron mountain overshadowed it, but the coffin nails and screws and the shovels came from Pittsburg[h]. With hard woods and metals abounding, the corpse was hauled on a wagon from South Bend, Indiana. A hickory grove grew near by, but the pick and shovel handles came from New York. The cotton shirt on the dead man came from Cincinnati, the coat and breeches from Chicago, the shoes from Boston; the folded hands were encased in white gloves from New York, and round the poor neck, that had worn all its living days the bondage of lost opportunity, was twisted a cheap cravat from Philadelphia. That country, so rich in undeveloped resources, furnished nothing for the funeral except the corpse and the hole in the ground, and would probably have imported both of those if it could have done so. . . .

There are now more than $3,000,000 invested in marble quarries and machinery around that grave. Its pitiful loneliness is broken with the rumble of ponderous machines, and a strange tumult pervades the wilderness. Twenty miles away, the largest marble-cutting works in the world put to shame in a thousand shapes its modest headstone. Forty miles away four coffin factories, with their exquisite work, tempt the world to die. The iron hills are gashed and swarm with workmen. Forty cotton mills in a near radius weave infinite cloth that neighboring shops make into countless shirts. There are shoe factories, nail factories, shovel and pick factories, and carriage factories, to supply the other wants. And that country can now get up as nice a funeral, native and home-made, as you would wish to have.

The industrial growth of the South in the past ten years has been without precedent or parallel. It has been a great revolution, effected in peace. . . .

The race problem casts the only shadow that rests on the South. Truly the negro avenges the wrongs put upon him by the New England traders who brought him from Africa, and the Southern slave-holders who held him in bondage. . . .

SOUTHERN BELIEFS REGARDING RACE TROUBLES.

First—That the whites shall have clear and unmistakable control of public affairs. They own the property. They have the intelligence. Theirs is the responsibility. For these reasons they are entitled to control. Beyond these reasons is a racial one. They are the superior race, and will not and cannot submit to the domination of an inferior race. . . .

Second—That the whites and blacks must walk in separate paths in the South. As near as may be, these paths should be made equal—but separate they must be now and always. This means separate schools, separate churches, separate accommodation everywhere—but equal accommodation where the same money is charged, or where the State provides for the citizen. Georgia gives her State University $8,000 a year; precisely the same sum to her colored university. . . .

The negroes of Georgia pay but one-fortieth of the taxes, and yet they take forty-nine per cent. of the school fund. Railroads in Georgia provide separate but equal cars for whites and blacks, and a white man is not permitted to occupy a colored car. This separation is not offensive to either race, but is accepted by both races as the best conducive to the common peace and prosperity. . . .

It must not be imagined that the negro is outlawed in the South. He has ten avenues of employment in this section to where he has one in the North. . . . Whatever the negro is fitted to do, he has abundant chance to do. All this, too, in the South, where the negro is in such numbers that he seriously competes for work and lowers wages. All this is done, too, without protest or without friction. . . .

On these two lines of action, political and social, the South has moved rapidly towards the solution of the race problem. If left alone, it can solve it. Interference simply irritates, and outside opinion simply misjudges. The negroes are prospering and are contented.

Source: Henry W. Grady, The New South (New York: Robert Bonner’s Sons, 1890), 188–91, 231, 239, 244–51.