They came in waves. The Interurbans—electric trains that crisscrossed the Midwest back then—came from Michigan and Ohio and from across Indiana. Hundreds arrived on a train hired special from Chicago. And on the roads there was car after car after car, hulking and black, and overloaded with Klansmen.

It was not the first time, not by a lot. The Ku Klux Klan had been doing this for years now, showing up in huge numbers in a town, usually invited, always with a permit. Klan gatherings in the first half of the 1920s were a rally and a party and a threat all in one. Sometimes there were carnival rides, other times there were fireworks shows, almost always there were parades complete with marching bands. At night there would be barbeque and speakers spitting hate and patriotism in equal measure. And then there were crosses. Always crosses. Crosses ringed with electric lights. Pyrotechnic crosses launched into the air. And of course cross burnings, the culmination of an evening's festivities, towns all over competed to host the largest cross burnings.

But that day, May 17, 1924, it was South Bend, Indiana's turn. South Bend, the home of the University of Notre Dame, was in the crosshairs because the Klan was virulently anti-Catholic and Notre Dame was the center of Catholic education. The Klan of the 1920s wasn't just a racist organization, they expanded their hate to include Jews and Catholics and immigrants (which back then were largely one and the same, as many Jews and Catholics had recently immigrated to America from Eastern Europe, Germany, Italy, and Ireland). Expanding their hateful scope brought them huge success. The Klan of the 1920s had millions of members, a women's auxiliary, and a Junior Klan for kids. They were also politically powerful, the driving force behind the Immigration Act of 1924, which would pass 10 days later and create the US Border Patrol.

So the Klan gathering in South Bend—billed as a "May festival, celebration, and parade"—was different. Sure there would be a barbeque and a parade, but this was a show of force too. In many ways this "Konklave," as their gatherings were known, was the culmination of the Klan's anti-Catholic bigotry. They boasted that 50,000 Klansmen, women, and children would descend on the town to take part in what was expected to be a weekend-long celebration. DC Stephenson, the grand dragon of the Indiana region, and HW Evans, the imperial wizard of the national Klan, were on hand to speak. This was a big deal. This was a chance for the Klan, at the very height of their political power, to show the Catholics of Notre Dame where they stood.

Except.

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