The Klan years: the letter, and the fight

1923 — MAY 1924

In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan was a power in Indiana, and South Bend was where it met a street it could not hold: The Klan of that decade was anti-Black, anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic, and in a city of Polish parishes and a Catholic university it had chosen its enemies openly. The first wound was the quieter one: the letter of 1923, signed "KKK," threatening a Black prisoner in the city jail and the Black community behind him, after which — by the account carried in the city's histories — more than a thousand Black residents fled South Bend within days. It stands in this record as documented terror with a documented effect: a measurable share of a community, gone in a week, in a northern industrial city in 1923.

The second confrontation was public. In May 1924 the Klan gathered in South Bend for a conference and a parade, with its local headquarters at 230 South Michigan Street, and on the Saturday of the gathering posted its men around town to direct traffic. The men it had marked as enemies were the students of Notre Dame, and the students came downtown: by noon they had unmasked and unrobed the Klan's traffic directors, and through the day several hundred of them besieged the Klan headquarters, throwing rocks and smashing its windows, until police and university officials pulled them back to the campus — Knute Rockne, the football coach, among the men who helped calm them. Scuffles ran on over the following days; the parade as planned never owned the street. The episode is sometimes dated to October 1924 in casual retelling; the record dates it to May 1924, and it is carried here at the record's date. The Klan's Indiana empire collapsed within two years in scandal and prosecution, and the fight at the bend remained its most famous defeat — a factory city and a Catholic campus refusing, together and in the street, to be governed by it.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend reference history — the 1923 letter signed "KKK," the threats against the jailed man and the Black population, and the flight of more than a thousand Black residents within days.
2. University of Notre Dame and city accounts of the May 1924 confrontation — the Klan conference and planned parade, the headquarters at 230 South Michigan Street, the student unmasking of the traffic directors, the siege of the headquarters, and the roles of the police, the university and Rockne in restoring order.
3. black-history section, this record — the Klan decade in South Bend in full.