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Memories of the Ku Klux Klan in
One Indiana Town
WILLIAM CLAYTON WILKINSON, JR.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your tears wash out a Word of it.
Omar Khayyam, "The Rubaiyat" (1120 CE), LXXI
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| During the summer of 1924 the Ku Klux Klan carried out four distinct aggressive actions in the northern Indiana town of North Judson. I was a lad of ten years at the time; I watched two of these events unfold before my eyes and I witnessed the evidence of the others in the days that followed. A fiery cross, a public parade, a homemade bomb, and open vandalism—these acts threatened all of the Catholics in our community, and, for me, left scars that have not been erased in the intervening eight decades. Midway through high school I left North Judson behind, but though I graduated from Purdue University, moved to the East Coast, and worked a lifelong career as an engineer, the memories remain. |
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I have never really discussed the incidents with anyone, although I have, on occasion, reminisced for the benefit of my own four children. Twice I set out to put the story on paper, but neither attempt came to fruition. Some years ago I felt that I should check my own memory, and I hired a person to comb the Starke County newspapers for any shred of documentation of the incidents. She turned up a small amount of additional information but nothing at variance with my memory. |
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Having myself annotated two family histories written by my ancestors, I know that such recollections can in fact be accurate, particularly when they concern important events that have become firmly embedded in a person's mind.1 This, I believe, is the case with my memories of the Klan in North Judson. I knew these people; I delivered newspapers to their doors; I went to high school with their children. In face-to-face encounters I never felt threatened by them; yet their public acts were committed behind a veil of secrecy. |
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Speaking of Indiana's Klan-marked past, one Noblesville resident concluded that "You can't burn history."2 As Omar Khayyam writes, such tragedies of the past cannot be washed away with tears either. My purpose is neither to cry nor to condemn. I present these incidents only to record a bit of history not yet put to print. In so doing, I stress the deliberate and vicious nature of the Klan's activities in my home town.
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Shortly before the time of my birth, a Starke County historian had pointed to "the spirit of progress" that typified the area in its early days. Beginning with a first white settler and first white child (1835), county boosters traced a line of development through a sawmill (1849), county organization (1850), and the founding of the towns of Knox (1850) and North Judson (1860). Soon, four different rail lines—the Chicago & Great Eastern (1861); the Chicago & Atlantic (1885); the Indiana, Illinois, & Iowa (1887); and the Cincinnati, Richmond, & Muncie (1902)—converged on North Judson, transforming the "enterprising little city" into the county's "railroad center."3 |
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By the time of my childhood, the rail lines (three of which connected to Chicago) not only brought progress but also speculation and vice to Starke County. Some of Chicago's better-known gangsters slipped out of the city for high jinks, bootlegging, and gambling at English Lake, a crossroads community on the Kankakee River in the northern part of the county, and at Bass Lake, a few miles east of North Judson.4 |
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