Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, then magnified the untrue claim, saying 9-1-1 calls had been made about Haitian immigrants grabbing geese out of the city’s parks and eating them.
He’s since doubled down, first questioning Haitians’ legal status and this week at rallies in Arizona and Nevada claiming immigrant children are “ruining the quality of American education.”
Springfield’s mayor, its police department and even Ohio Governor Mike DeWine – who was born in Springfield, still lives nearby and whose family supports a school in Haiti – debunked the stories of Haitians eating pets and grabbing geese.
But by then the seeds of hate were sewn and that led to bomb threats at schools and government offices; the cancellation of community events and the arrival of various white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Proud Boys and the Blood Tribe, a violent Neo-Nazi hate group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, who showed up hiding their faces with red masks and waving swastika flags as they marched through town and in front of the mayor’s home.
Some in these groups carried guns. Others harassed the townsfolk. And one group stood outside City Hall holding a banner that read in both English and Creole: “Haitians have no home here.”
Some Haitian immigrants in town have said their homes have been vandalized and many feel unsafe.
Trump has announced, should he win the presidency, he would begin with mass deportations of Springfield’s Haitians and at a recent Pennsylvania rally he told the crowd “You have to get them the hell out.”
Thursday, he told a crowd in Tempe, Arizona, that the U.S. is “the garbage can of the world” for taking in refugees and immigrants.
Against this ugly backdrop, Springfield High School’s football team has remained a glorious example of all that is right in the town. The Wildcats — coached by former Trotwood-Madison High star and longtime NFL safety Mo Douglass — have won some big games this season with a mix of players: white, brown and black, including a couple who are Haitian and are gifted athletically, do their work in the classroom, come from loving families and are embraced by their teammates.
As for this being a history repeat, let’s go back 101 years to here in Dayton and another story that involves racial intolerance, targeted immigrants, an anti-Catholic sentiment directed at the University of Dayton and — thanks to the wondrous research and storytelling of Dr. William “Bill” Trollinger, a professor in the history and religious studies department at UD, author and public speaker — an account of the UD football team who flexed their muscles and balled up their fists as they too sought to right a wrong.
Credit: Larry Burgess
Credit: Larry Burgess
Back in 1923 Ohio had more Ku Klux Klan members than any other state.
And Dayton was a sanctuary city — for the Klan. It was named as one of six in the nation that fully embraced the white supremacists group.
It’s thought that at least 18 percent of Dayton’s population that was eligible in the early 1920s ― meaning those who were not Catholic, Jewish or African American — joined the Klan. That would be 15,000, though some estimates have it much more than that.
Two Klan newspapers were published in Dayton. The Klan had a basketball team whose results were published in the local newspapers.
In September of 1923, the city hosted a huge Klan parade that stretched from Monument Avenue downtown to the Montgomery County Fairgrounds on South Main Street. From published photos back then you can see the crowd lining the parade route and watching from rooftops above.
Special trains had been added to get participants to the city.
There were hooded, white-robed marching bands and floats featuring schools and towns in the Miami Valley.
Over 32,000 people crammed into the Fairgrounds to watch some 7,000 initiates kneel before a 100-foot burning cross and pledge they were “pure Americans.” There were fireworks, a Klan plane with a bright red cross on the fuselage circled overhead and the keynote speaker denounced immigrants, Catholics and Jews and, in so many words, also called America a garbage can for taking them in.
In Dayton, Trollinger said, that meant targeting people from Southern and Eastern Europe who’d come here for jobs at local factories and Catholics and Jews because the Klan didn’t consider them to be fully American.
Just like the bogus pet-eating claim a century later, the hate groups in 1923 trumpeted fake news as well, including that the ROTC building on the UD campus was really a training ground for armed troops of the pope.
The Klan began harassing UD students and terrorizing the campus. It burned crosses on a hill in Woodland Cemetery overlooking UD and eventually ventured onto campus, first with flaming crosses and later with small bombs.
Finally, UD football coach Harry Baujan — a World War I veteran known as The Blond Beast when he played at Notre Dame and in the NFL — had enough.
He and his players helped put a stop to the terror attacks in what remains one of the most heroic and — until Trollinger came along — untold sports-related stories in University of Dayton history.
Unearthing history
In 1996 Trollinger was a newly hired professor at UD when he was petitioned by the provost, Rev. Jim Heft, to write a paper on a religious aspect of the school that could be presented in three months at an interfaith Thanksgiving gathering sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
“I’d only been here a week or two and didn’t know anything about the history,” he said as he sat in his office on the UD campus the other afternoon. “I did know that the Klan had been big in Ohio, so I started combing through old newspapers and it was all there.”
He turned a small religious history class he was teaching into a research team, and the students not only scoured old newspapers, but they went into the community and found aging survivors of some of those Klan harassments.
Then came the coup.
Trollinger heard a rumor that Baujan and his team once confronted the Klan.
Searching through the UD Archives he said he came across a box of taped interviews from the 1970s and found the transcript of a 1974 interview with Baujan and one of his players, Jack Brown, that was conducted by Brother Joseph Gaudet.
During the interview Brown prompted Baujan to “tell the story of the Klan.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” Trollinger said. “It was fantastic.”
After getting a tip the Klan was going to burn another cross on the edge of the campus, Baujan said he “went to the halls and called out” his biggest players. He told them to wait until the hooded interlopers gathered around the burning cross and then they should “take after them and tear their shirts off … or anything else you want to do.”
Early in the season, UD had run roughshod over Central Normal of Indiana, 161-0.
This rout was worse.
The Klan ended up running in fear into the darkness.
Finally, on Dec. 17, 1923, the Klan attempted one more calculated invasion. It was the first day of Christmas break so the supremacists figured the football team would be home for the holidays.
Over 40 carloads of Klan members showed up at the campus late that night and set off 12 bombs that did minor damage before they tried to burn another cross.
Emboldened by the football boys’ past efforts, the students still left in the dorms ran out and confronted the attackers, as did a crowd of campus neighbors. The Klan again made a hasty retreat.
When UD president Reverend Bernard P. O’Reilly got no satisfaction from the Dayton police who did a one-day investigation and claimed to find no leads — maybe because it was suspected that half the police force was Klan-affiliated — he made overtures of pressing for a federal investigation.
That may have caused the Klan to back off, though Trollinger said what really sated them came just a year later when “they got everything they wanted.”
Congress passed the Johnson Reed Act which remained in place until the 1960s and drastically reduced the number of immigrants who could enter the U.S. from Southern and Eastern Europe and from Asia.
Trollinger turned much of this into his project for Heft and years later, after more research, he wrote an award-winning article — “Hearing the Silence: The University of Dayton, the Ku Klux Klan and Catholic Universities and Colleges in the 1920s” — that was published in the American Catholic Studies and later an abridged version appeared in the University of Dayton magazine.
Trollinger — who has authored a book with his wife Susan, a UD English professor — is also an Ohio Humanities speaker and has a fascinating presentation on the Klan in Ohio in the 1920s and he includes the story on Baujan and his team taking a stand.
In the past two months he’s presented it at the Roger Glass Center for the Arts, the Dayton Metro Library and at Christ Church Cathedral in Cincinnati. Next month he’ll give it in Marietta.
When he spoke at the Glass, he said three people brought up the similarities they saw from the 1923 incidents and Springfield today. It was the same in Cincinnati.
“I end my Klan talk saying there’s always been a dispute in America as to who can really be American,” Trollinger said.
“On one hand you have folks who think anybody can be American. You learn a little bit of the Constitution and swear loyalty to it — the normal naturalization ceremony stuff — and you can be American.
“But there’s another group who says you need to be the right race, the right ethnicity, the right religion, and, now, the right gender orientation to be 100 percent American.
“And here we are, 100 years later, and it’s still not clear who’s winning the argument.”
A push to honor the past
“One of the most shocking things from the research was the way the university ‘quote end quote’ forgot its own history,” Trollinger said. “When I presented the paper on the topic at a history conference, a big-name historian who graduated from UD stood up and said ‘I can’t believe it! I was there in the ‘40s and I never heard a word about it.’ ”
And on a personal note, I was at UD in the late 1960s and early ‘70s and I never heard about it either. Nor did it ever come up during all the years I covered UD as a sportswriter. The first I learned of it was when Trollinger’s article was published in 2013.
At the time I asked several prominent members of UD athletic administration, and they knew nothing of Baujan and his team taking on the Klan either.
Since the story has come to light, there’s still no reference on campus anywhere of those 1920s events.
Notre Dame, on the other hand, celebrates its students’ efforts in confronting the anti-Catholic assaults by the Klan.
In May of 1924, the Klan planned a three-day rally in South Bend and Notre Dame students — especially the football players — rebuffed them, sometimes even pulling their hoods off then.
Students threw potatoes at the Klan’s second floor office window downtown, behind which was a lighted red cross, the long-standing symbol of the hate group.
Unsuccessful in knocking out the light, they called upon Irish quarterback Harry Stuhldreher, who four months later would be immortalized as one of the famed Four Horsemen.
It took him one throw to turn the Klan office dark.
Although an editorial in a Youngstown paper criticized the Notre Dame students as “papal pirates,” they were praised by most news outlets.
One Notre Dame alum has written a book on the subject entitled “Notre Dame vs. The Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defied the KKK.”
Trollinger surmises UD was trying to assimilate into the community in early 1920s — hence, in part, the school changing its name from St. Mary’s College to the University of Dayton — and was embarrassed when the Klan labeled Catholics and the school as not 100 percent American.
“The school wanted to be recognized as the university of the city back then, which they are now,” he said.
Today there is no reason for UD not to honor the students — and especially the lead taken by Baujan and his players — for defending their school and themselves from the Klan attacks.
Trollinger has lobbied for that and I agree with him.
“Baujan and his players, it’s a heroic story,” he said. “They were being terrorized and they stood up to stop it. I don’t understand.
“When I spoke at the Glass, a guy from the NAACP suggested that UD should erect a statue of Harry Baujan, honoring him for that.
“I’m pushing for some kind of memorial. I think that would be appropriate.”
Again, I agree. But more than a statue, I wish, at least for a night or two, we could have Baujan and his football boys back in the flesh and blood so they could take a trip to Springfield and stand up to the swastika wavers and hate spewers.
It would be fitting to see history repeat itself once again.
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