College students take aim at Atlanta's Henry Grady statue
Last edited Wed Dec 4, 2019, 03:51 PM - Edit history (1)
Source: Associated Press
Jeff Martin, Associated Press
Updated 12:47 pm CST, Wednesday, December 4, 2019
ATLANTA (AP) — Some Georgia State University students are demanding that Atlanta's mayor remove a prominent statue of Henry Grady from downtown.
Grady was a 19th Century newspaper editor who advocated for a “New South” after the Civil War. A plaque on the statue, which was erected in 1891, describes him as a patriot.
But Grady also campaigned against equality for freed slaves, saying “the supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever."
“Let us be clear in recognizing that Grady, as a journalist, promoted racism,” several student groups wrote in an editorial Tuesday in Georgia State's student newspaper. “Grady, as an orator, promoted racism. And Grady was certainly no patriot -- he was simply a racist."
Read more: https://www.chron.com/news/us/article/College-students-take-aim-at-Atlanta-s-Henry-14880926.php
Henry Grady
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She had first cousins named Henry, Woodfin, and Grady. I attended Henry Grady Elementary School (long since defunct) in grades 1 through 8. Grady was a product of the 19th Century with all its misunderstandings, prejudices, and incorrect facts. If we set about removing or destroying every monument to 19th-Century historical figures who embraced positions seen as repulsive in the 21st Century, our demolition teams are going to be busy, busy, busy. Here's an interesting quote from that notorious racist, Abraham Lincoln:
"I will say then, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters of the negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office, of having them to marry with white people. I will say in addition, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I suppose, will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality, and inasmuch, as they cannot so live, that while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, that I as much as any other man am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man."
...Harold Holzer, Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 1993
Source: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-lincoln-racism-equality-oppose/
Having said all that, by all means demolish the monument to Henry W. Grady. What earthly difference could it make to anyone today? It might, actually, facilitate the flow of traffic, which is notoriously snarled and tangled in Atlanta. 
