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The county's unrest century, set out as one set with each member at its ground: (1) The Klan clash, May 17–19, 1924, South Bend. The Indiana Klan at its zenith — by the mid-1920s it had, in the University of Notre Dame's own centenary summary, leveraged control of the state Republican party into offices “from the governor's office on down” under Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson — chose South Bend, the state's most Catholic city, for a show of force: a mass meeting and parade for its Indiana, Michigan and Illinois members. The mayor refused the parade permit; the university's president ordered his students to ignore it; and on May 17 the students and the town unmasked the robed street-corner guides, cleared the business district by 11:30 a.m., besieged the Klan's headquarters at Michigan and Wayne and broke its illuminated cross with potatoes. The Klan's Indiana empire broke the next year, on Stephenson's conviction for the abduction, rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer. That is the county's Klan record at full strength; Penn Township's own Klan record — a klavern, a cross-burning, a Klan office or vote on this ground — is not in any source reached, and the town's large foreign-born and Catholic-adjacent farm population of the 1920s stands in the census record without a Klan story attached to it in print. (2) 1967, South Bend.(3) 1968, South Bend. The April 29, 1968 sit-in at the school administration building, with clergy among those jailed overnight (participant oral history); the same spring's county political earthquake — Robert Kennedy's April 4 Notre Dame address — is an events-leg telling, cross-referenced, not an unrest item. (4) May 2020, South Bend and Mishawaka. On May 30, 2020, hundreds marched twice through downtown South Bend in the George Floyd protests — at noon and at 6 p.m., ending outside the police department — and the Tribune's account closes the day exact: the marches “had remained peaceful, with no arrests, injuries or property damage, as of late Saturday night,” the names of Eric Logan, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery shouted beside Floyd's. The set's nearest approach to Penn ground came five weeks later and one city over: on July 4, 2020, about thirty people protested at Mishawaka's Main Street bridge, and a car drove through the protesters, dragging one of them fifty feet. That is Mishawaka ground, printed as boundary. (5) Labor unrest.The set's verdict for this ground is uniform and is printed once: across a century of county unrest, no riot, clash, curfew, march or strike is recorded in Osceola or on Penn Township ground in any source reached.
This build's Crime & Public Safety and Population — the scope record and the township's composition.