The Klan clash, May 1924

May 17–19, 1924 · downtown, and 230 South Michigan Street

The setup: In May 1924 the Ku Klux Klan — then at the height of its Indiana power, its movement told in Black History — announced a three-day rally in South Bend beginning Saturday, May 17, with a picnic and a parade, in what the university's own account calls the most Catholic area in the state, blocks from the Catholic university on the hill. Notre Dame's president, the Rev. Matthew Walsh, posted a bulletin urging his students to ignore the rally and stay on campus, and his representatives met Police Chief Larry Lane the day before; Lane assured them the city would not grant the Klan a parade permit. The clash that followed is told here as an event, hour by hour as the record allows, principally from the university's official history by the Rev. Arthur Hope (1948) as carried in Todd Tucker's Notre Dame vs. the Klan (2004) and the university's published accounts of its centenary.

Saturday: On Saturday morning, robed Klansmen were downtown directing traffic. Some five hundred students ran the two miles from campus and set on them — not with weapons but with hands, unmasking and unrobing Klansmen in the alleys. Hope's official history tells it in one breath: "Up an alley, down a side street… a Klansman would emerge without his sheet, and sometimes with a black eye." Robes were carried off as trophies; sophomore Bill Foohey was photographed wearing a captured one. The crowd then went at the Klan's headquarters at the corner of Wayne and Michigan, 230 South Michigan Street, where a "fiery cross" of red light bulbs burned in a third-floor window. The grocery on the ground floor kept barrels of potatoes outside, and the potatoes went through the air until every bulb but the top one was broken. The crowd called up Harry Stuhldreher, the football team's quarterback, and — as Tucker tells it — Stuhldreher's throw broke the last bulb. Students rushed the stairs of the headquarters; a man claiming to be a Baptist preacher put a pistol in Foohey's chest. Seniors brokered a compromise — the Klan might parade, but unrobed and unarmed — and before it could be tested, a rainstorm ended the picnic and foiled the parade altogether. The day's toll, as the record states it: no one was seriously hurt; there were eight arrests, six of them students, two of those for profane language. The sheriff deputized some thirty Klansmen. The South Bend Tribune's headline read: "Klan display in South Bend proves failure."

Monday night: The weekend's real violence waited for Monday, May 19. A telephone call to Freshman Hall claimed the Klan was beating a captured student, and about five hundred students hurried downtown into an ambush near the Klan office — prepared Klansmen, police, and sheriff's deputies, with bottles, rocks, bats, and police clubs in the fighting. The students regrouped on the courthouse lawn, and there Father Walsh mounted a cannon standing on the lawn and ordered them home: "Whatever challenge may have been offered tonight to your patriotism, whatever insult may have been offered to your religion, you can show your loyalty to Notre Dame and to South Bend by ignoring all threats." The students marched back to campus. Knute Rockne, saying the same thing in the football team's language, told them later: "Father Walsh is your quarterback… follow the signals of Father Walsh." No student was ever disciplined for the weekend.

The date that was not: Retellings sometimes put the clash in October. The record explains why: the Klan's handbill promised a revenge rally for October 18, 1924, and that rally never took place. The clash is May's. A century on, the city and the university marked it together: the Indiana Historical Society's "RESIST!: Notre Dame Students Stand Up to the KKK" exhibit ran into January 2026, The History Museum showed it at the Community Learning Center from May 17 to October 13, 2024, and Senator Todd Young marked the centenary on the Senate floor in October 2024.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame, "A Clash Over Catholicism," Notre Dame Stories, August 2018 — the narrative from Todd Tucker, Notre Dame vs. the Klan (2004), and the Rev. Arthur Hope, the university's official history (1948), quoted for the alley fighting.
2. Notre Dame Magazine, "The Clash with the Klan" — the university's account of the weekend and its centenary.
3. Indiana Historical Bureau — the marker-side account of the May 1924 confrontation and the headquarters at 230 South Michigan Street.
4. WNDU, 2024 — the centenary coverage: the "RESIST!" exhibits in Indianapolis and at The History Museum, South Bend, and Senator Young's Senate floor remarks.
5. Black History section of this history — the Klan's Indiana decade, of which this weekend was the street-level hour; the 1923 Klan letter and the exodus it reports are told there.