The phrase "New South" has done so much rhetorical work over the past century that it is fair to ask, in the spring of 1986, what it now denotes. Henry Grady used it in 1886 to describe an industrial future that would replace the antebellum economy. His successors have used it, in the intervening hundred years, to describe roughly every decade's version of Atlanta's aspirations.

What it describes in 1986 is a particular arithmetic. Fulton County's non-agricultural payroll has doubled since 1975. Hartsfield has become the second-busiest passenger airport in the world. The city's downtown skyline, unrecognizable to anyone who last saw it in 1970, is on its second full replacement cycle. The metropolitan population, which crossed two million in 1979, will cross three million before the end of the decade.

What the arithmetic does not describe, and what any serious reckoning with the New South must, is what has been asked of the neighborhoods the growth has moved through. West End. Vine City. Grant Park before its restoration. The particular way in which prosperity in one part of the city has, historically, meant displacement in another, and the way in which the language of the New South has, historically, been more comfortable with the first half of that sentence than with the second.

This is an archival excerpt. The full piece runs to roughly nine thousand words in the April 1986 print edition and has been digitized from the print archive without editorial revision. — The Editors, 2026.