The week leading up to Independence Day 1913 was a turning point in American self-understanding and selective memory: while tens of thousands of Union and Confederate veterans gathered in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for a “festival of national reconciliation,” over 4,000 people attended the opening of the The Hotel Ansley on the corner of Forsyth and James Streets in Atlanta to celebrate the opening of “one of the most attractive and most modern hotels in America.” It was supposed to be a bright new morning for the nation and for the “new South:” a forward-looking consolidation of national and regional identity through public memorials and private galas. The Gettysburg reunion was a classically American attempt at national healing through a conciliatory barbecue; the Atlanta opening an equally characteristic act of black-tied atonement through commercial progress. Both events shared something else in common: those whom they left out of the new national consensus. No black Union veterans were invited to the Gettysburg event. In Atlanta, despite proclaiming itself in 1913 open to “every Southerner,” and promising to be “the home of all Georgians visiting Atlanta,” the doors of the Ansley would be closed to African-Americans for another fifty years.
Next Door is Closer than You Remember
Next Door is Closer than You Remember
Next Door is Closer than You Remember
The week leading up to Independence Day 1913 was a turning point in American self-understanding and selective memory: while tens of thousands of Union and Confederate veterans gathered in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for a “festival of national reconciliation,” over 4,000 people attended the opening of the The Hotel Ansley on the corner of Forsyth and James Streets in Atlanta to celebrate the opening of “one of the most attractive and most modern hotels in America.” It was supposed to be a bright new morning for the nation and for the “new South:” a forward-looking consolidation of national and regional identity through public memorials and private galas. The Gettysburg reunion was a classically American attempt at national healing through a conciliatory barbecue; the Atlanta opening an equally characteristic act of black-tied atonement through commercial progress. Both events shared something else in common: those whom they left out of the new national consensus. No black Union veterans were invited to the Gettysburg event. In Atlanta, despite proclaiming itself in 1913 open to “every Southerner,” and promising to be “the home of all Georgians visiting Atlanta,” the doors of the Ansley would be closed to African-Americans for another fifty years.