ATLANTA — A group of Grady High School alumni presented a petition to the Atlanta School Board during Monday evening's meeting, opposing the demands of some current students that the name of the nearly 100-year-old school be changed.
According to the language of the petition itself, Grady, an orator, journalist and early editor for the Atlanta Constitution, was a "progressive visionary who devoted his life to actually making Atlanta 'the city busy to hate.'"
The petition was delivered to the board by Atlanta attorney Cary King, a Grady High School graduate of the class of 1959.
According to the petition, Grady was "famous as an evangel for the New South, a land that rose above, as he said, ‘ignoble prejudice and memory’ to industrialize in prosperous harmony with its former enemies…For this, both he and his progressive newspaper…were forever vilified by the KKK and like-minded bigots.”
The group of students who oppose the petition and are demanding the name change insist that Grady is a racist whose conception of the "New South" was based on the supremacy of whites over blacks.
In an impassioned speech during the public comment section of the board meeting, King said the petition has obtained 420 signatures so far, and that more were coming in.
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