He became gravely ill and died on December 23 in Atlanta, at age thirty-nine. In early December 1889, a weakened Grady discounted the advice of his physician and went to Boston to speak on race relations. He encouraged the 1881 International Cotton Exposition, helped to found the Georgia Institute of Technology, and organized Atlanta’s first minor league baseball team. Grady understood that economic development was crucial to rebuilding the South, and he used the Constitution to promote the region at every opportunity. Field, promoter of the transatlantic cable. In 1880, at age thirty, he bought a one-quarter interest in the Constitution with $20,000 borrowed from Cyrus W. Grady traveled the country as a correspondent, writing impressions of the North and its leaders for his southern readers and sending reports of southern development to northern papers. Stanton, whose poem “Might Lak’ a Rose!” was recited by schoolchildren and set to music.Ĭourtesy of Special Collections & Archives, Georgia State University Library. Later Grady and Harris were joined by another literary light of the period, Georgia poet laureate Frank L. His first “Uncle Remus” column appeared in the newspaper in 1878. Harris, who was extremely shy and often stammered, grew up in Eatonton, but had come to Atlanta from Savannah to escape a yellow fever epidemic. Grady, in turn, talked Howell into hiring another young newspaperman, Joel Chandler Harris, as an associate editor. Grady from the Atlanta Daily Herald as a political writer and later managing editor.

Immediately after joining the paper, Howell hired twenty-six-year-old Henry W. Both Hemphill and Howell served as mayor of Atlanta, Hemphill during his years as a Constitution executive and Howell after he retired from the paper. Howell bought an interest in the Constitution and became its president and editor-in-chief, positions he held until 1897. Hemphill served as principal owner and publisher until 1901. Six months later Styles moved to Texas and sold his interest to his partner, James Anderson, who subsequently passed it to William Arnold Hemphill, his son-in-law and the paper’s business manager. president Andrew Johnson, who thought it apt for a Democratic newspaper advocating the restoration of constitutional government (Georgia remained under federal military rule at the time). Legend says the new name was suggested by U.S. He bought the Atlanta Daily Opinion, one of several newspapers serving the city’s 20,288 residents, and renamed it the Atlanta Constitution.

The Constitution was founded in 1868 by Carey Wentworth Styles, an Atlanta lawyer and entrepreneur.

Grady, whose lobbying efforts set the stage for the South’s agricultural and industrial growth following a difficult Reconstruction period Joel Chandler Harris, whose colorful Uncle Remus tales -African American folk tales written in dialect-first appeared in the Constitution Margaret Mitchell, the author of the international best-seller Gone With the Wind Ralph McGill, a passionate voice of reason in the early days of the civil rights movement, whose personal essays-a new journalistic form-ran on the front page of the Constitution. The Journal and Constitution have won numerous Pulitzer Prizes and have nurtured the careers of many famous journalists, including: Henry W. The Journal-Constitution is the largest daily newspaper in the Southeast, with an average daily circulation of 640,000. The longtime rivals, which had been under common ownership since March 1950, merged on November 5, 2001, and are currently published daily under a joint masthead. Until recently, Atlanta had two-the Atlanta Constitution, first published on June 16, 1868, and the Atlanta Journal, which debuted on February 24, 1883. Few cities in America have a daily newspaper that has published continuously for more than 100 years.

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