When Notre Dame students blocked the Ku Klux Klan at a train station
In May 1924 the Ku Klux Klan planned a week-long rally in South Bend, Indiana. Students from nearby Notre Dame met the Klansmen at the railway station, kept them from getting off their trains and tore their regalia. Their hostility helped bring down the Klan in the state.
Notre Dame made a natural target. By the 1920s the Catholic university had become a flagship for Irish Americans and Catholics, who gathered around radios to hear its football team beat Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Army, schools that stood for the Protestant establishment. After the station clash on May 17, thousands of students gathered downtown two days later, and only the arrival of president Matthew Walsh stopped more fighting. Coach Knute Rockne then addressed a campus rally urging restraint, and within days the gathering broke up.
The school's roots lie in a land purchase. Stephen Badin, who holds the distinction of being the earliest priest ordained on American soil, came to northern Indiana at the invitation of the Potawatomi chief Leopold Pokagon and bought 524 acres in 1830. In 1842 the bishop of Vincennes handed it to Edward Sorin, a Holy Cross priest, provided a college went up within two years. Sorin arrived with eight brothers on November 26, 1842, started teaching in Badin's old log chapel with two students, and gained a state charter in 1844.
Disaster struck in April 1879, when fire destroyed the Main Building and its library. Rebuilding began on May 17, and the current building, crowned by the Golden Dome, was ready for the fall semester of that same year. Presidents then argued over whether Notre Dame should remain a small boarding school or become a research university; John Zahm pushed the latter so hard that his order, worried about debt, declined to renew his term.
Football paid for much of the growth. Under Rockne, head coach from 1918, the team won three national championships and posted the highest winning percentage in top-division college football history, .881. Revenue from the game funded over $2.8 million of 1930s construction, including Notre Dame Stadium. Today the university enrolls 13,042 students.
Source: University of Notre Dame
