The Klan's Indiana · the letter of 1923 and the church guarded

1920 – 1925

For a few years the hooded order effectively governed the state: The second Ku Klux Klan, organized in Indiana under D. C. Stephenson, reached a power in the 1920s that the 2026 Commission report states plainly: "The Klan essentially governed Indiana at this time" — the governor and many legislators were members or beholden, and as many as a third of the state's white Protestant men belonged. St. Joseph County's chapter was weaker than the state organization's but still counted, in the Commission's words, "hundreds of members in powerful positions," kept its headquarters at 230 South Michigan Street, and held its annual picnic and baseball game at Lake Maxinkuckee. Its pressure on Black South Bend was direct. In September 1923 the Black owner of a South Bend soda fountain received a letter signed "KKK" threatening to kill a Black man held in the city jail and to harm the rest of the city's Black population.

The Chicago Daily Tribune reported the consequence on 12 September 1923, under the headline "Negroes Leave South Bend in Fear of Klan": within a few days, more than a thousand African Americans fled the city. The figure is carried here as the contemporaneous press of record reported it; its scale should be read against Gordon's counts — 1,269 Black residents in the census of 1920, perhaps 3,000 by the Tribune's 1922 estimate — which make a flight of a thousand a third to most of the entire community, a measure of what the letter was meant to do and, by the report, did. The Klan also struck at the community's building: when the Rev. Buford Gordon led Taylor A.M.E. Zion in building its new church on Eddy Street, Klansmen tore at the structure as it rose, and the congregation and students from the University of Notre Dame guarded the building until the work was completed in 1925.

The following spring's open clash between the Klan and Notre Dame's students — the unmasking of the Klan's traffic directors and the siege of the Michigan Street headquarters in May 1924 — is told as an event in the Events section. Within two years the Indiana Klan's empire collapsed in the Stephenson scandal and prosecution; the letter's work, a community terrorized in its own city, is the part of the record that belongs here.

Sources:

1. "Negroes Leave South Bend in Fear of Klan," Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 September 1923 — the letter to the soda-fountain owner and the flight of more than a thousand Black residents "within a few days," as the contemporaneous report states them; the citation is identified from the reference carried in the city's modern histories.
2. City of South Bend, Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (2026), Parts I–II — the Klan's governance of Indiana, the county chapter's strength and picnic, and the attack on the Taylor A.M.E. Zion building and its guarding by the congregation and Notre Dame students to completion in 1925.
3. Buford F. Gordon, The Negro in South Bend (1922) — the population bounds (1,269 in 1920; the Tribune's estimate of about 3,000 in 1922) against which the flight figure is read.