Governor Did Well to Ignore Demands of Ku Klux Klan, Say Editors, Feb. 22, 1921

Governor Morrison did not attend the Ku Klux demonstration in Raleigh the other night which was largely put on for the purpose of trying to reduce his opposition to the movement. He did well. The Governor should give no countenance to this sort of an institution.

Looking at it as unprejudicedly as possible, it looks to be a slander upon the white man’s civilization and Anglo-Saxon intelligence that it should come into being. There is no danger either of government or civilization falling down. Otherwise, there would be virtue in any man or any set of men arming themselves to fight for its existence and preservation. But in North Carolina and in the South, the law is being majestically maintained. We are doing in public and by perfectly proper processes what the Ku Klux Klan proposed to do in private and by less orderly processes. We don’t like even the suggestion that we have reached such a point in the enforcement of law that we have to run back through a blood-rusted past and bring into play a weapon which was indispensable in its day, but which is totally out of place in modern society.

From the editorial page of the Charlotte News and Evening Chronicle, Tuesday, February 22, 1921