Raleigh, Jan. 14—Belief that both the House and Senate will adopt either the Bagget or Milliken or both aimed at unmasking the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina was expressed Thursday morning by House leaders.
Consideration of the Milliken bill in the House by judiciary committee number one was deferred at a committee meeting Wednesday afternoon on request from a member of the Junior Order, who stated to the committee that the latter organization wanted to be heard. Other orders have notified Speaker Dawson that they desire to be heard an the matter will probably get a full hearing next week.
In the meantime, the news dispatches from Bastrop, Louisiana, are engaging the attention of members of the legislature and cementing expressed opposition to the Klan in North Carolina. A poll of a dozen leaders of the House Thursday showed nine in favor of both the Baggett and Millken bills while three were opposed to the Baggett bill and favorably disposed to Representative Milliken’s measure. (Spelling switched to Baggett in this paragraph.)
Burgwyn May Start
A third and more far reaching bill, it is understood, has been drafted by Representative W.H.S. Burgwyn of Northampton, whose opposition to the order has brought him threats of political annihilation.
Burgwyn and other House members would include in the proposed Klan legislation a bill to cause a probe of widely published reports that at least two members of the State’s judiciary, including Judge Henry A. Grady of Clinton, said to be head of the Klan in North Carolina, more than one solicitor and other state officers are members and officers of the Klan.
There are a few members of the House who have been opposed to legislative action of any kind, basing their opposition on the conviction that if the Klan be let alone, it would die out quick enough. The Bastrop outrages are conclusive to some of these members, have worked for a modification of this attitude.
From page 3 of The Monroe Journal, Jan. 16, 1923
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