Excerpted from a 1948 column by The Atlanta Constitution’s Editor Ralph McGill:

It was just after midnight. I had finished packing and was lying down in my hotel room at St. Paul, Minn., wishing sleep would hurry up and come . ...

The telephone rang. It was a St. Paul reporter.

“This is going to be embarrassing to you,” he said, “coming as it does on the heels of your speech. But we want to ask you about the Ku Klux Klan forcing the presidents of the Negro institutions in Georgia to leave a university meeting.”

A few hours before I had asked the indulgence of a large audience ... and had said I wanted to depart from my text to talk a little bit about the South.

I told them I was proud of the South and of my State. I told them of the fine people who shared every good wish and desire for goodwill Americans in all other regions had. I told them the people of the South were for civil rights, even though we disagreed with methods proposed by the Messrs. Truman, Dewey and Wallace. I had talked of our progress and our desire to have our farmers make incomes as high as those of Minnesota and Iowa and the other great states of the Middle West. I told of our determination that our children, one day, should have as much an opportunity in school as theirs. But, most of all, I asked them to believe that despite occasional evidence to the contrary the people of the South were not willfully mean and violent, but were as eager to make a great America as they.

And then, two hours later, there I was with a query about the Ku Klux Klan at Milledgeville, Ga.

I told him that those who engaged in the stupid affront to decency and the name of the State, were the usual assortment of mentally arrested, natural-born jerks and oafs to be found in any community, St. Paul included. I explained that the three Negroes were much more valuable Georgians than the whole membership of the group, which had made jackasses of themselves, their city and State. I said that if all the membership of the Ku Klux Klan would leave Georgia the moral and intellectual level of the State would be raised considerably.