[Excerpted from "Governor Answers Chicago Paper," Raleigh News and Observer, 4 Aug 1919.]

"Absence from my office prevented an immediate answer to your telegram," the Governor wired. "By inheritance, by association and by a sympathetic understanding of his virtues and his limitations, the Southern white people are the natural and consistent friends of the negro.

"The recent troubles in Washington and Chicago confirm my conviction that the South is the best place in the world for a decent negro to make a decent living," continues the Governor's telegram. "In the South, the negro is not only afforded every opportunity but is given every encouragement to do honest, clean work. In North Carolina we are doing all we can to foster and promote the kindliest relations between the races, and to this end the wisest and best men and women of both races are steadily working.

"In every field of industry, in education, in religion and before the law, we are earnestly and honestly seeking to secure the same privileges and protection for the black people that is accorded the whites. The negroes of North Carolina know and appreciate that this policy is one of the passions of the present State administration. Socially, the two races are kept separate and apart and the white man or the negro who attempts to ignore the social barrier is held in utter contempt by the best people of both races.

"Candor and my deep friendship for and my abiding interests in the permanent happiness of the negro race compel me to add that it is the settled conviction of the best people in all political parties in the South that it is necessary for the protection, the progress and the happiness of both races for the government to be run by white people and it is the unalterable determination of the whites to keep in their own hands the reins of government.

"The farms, the lumber plants and the companies engaged in building public highways in North can easily absorb twenty-five thousand (25,000) negroes who may desire to come to this State for the purpose of securing honorable employment at remunerative wages. But, if during their residence in Chicago, any of these negroes have become tainted or intoxicated with dreams of social equality or of political dominion it would be well for them to remain where they are, for in the South such things are forever impossible."