Hate Organizes. So Does Community.
"The Record Belongs to Us" Week 4
White supremacy has always been most dangerous when it goes institutional — and has always met organized, joyful, potato-throwing resistance
Hey, friend.
Here’s something we both know but that I sometimes forget because things feel uniquely bad right now: organized hate is not a new phenomenon, and neither is organized resistance to it. What varies is the scale, the tactics, and — crucially — whether hate is operating at the level of street violence or state policy. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan had millions of members and controlled governments across the country. They were poised to win the Presidency. They lost, not because they ran out of hatred, but because communities organized against them… and because their own corruption eventually destroyed them from within.
The civil rights leader Ella Baker said: “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” She meant that the goal of organizing isn’t to find a savior; it’s to build the kind of community that can sustain resistance across time, across leadership changes, across setbacks. The Klan came to South Bend in 1924 and were met by the force of a very specific type of student activism. Rabbis and imams are hosting joint Shabbat and Iftar dinners. The specific forms change, but the principle doesn’t: organized hate has always had to reckon with organized community. And sometimes the community throws potatoes.
This week: organized hate, organized community, and who shows up when the Klan comes to town.
The History We Should Have Learned
Quick question: why are Notre Dame’s teams called the Fighting Irish? Here’s the actual story.
In May 1924, the Ku Klux Klan — which at that point had millions of members, including the governor of Indiana — decided to hold a rally in South Bend specifically to intimidate Notre Dame, one of the most prominent Catholic institutions in America. (The Klan terrorized Black people, but they were also anti-immigrant, and immigration and Catholicism were deeply intertwined in the Klan’s own birtherism narrative.) The president of Notre Dame asked the students to stay indoors to stay safe, since he knew the harm the Klan could wreak.
What happened instead: approximately five hundred Notre Dame students stormed the rally, ripped off Klan hoods and robes, chased members through the streets, and spent over an hour throwing potatoes at a glowing red cross the Klan had erected, knocking out one light bulb at a time until only one stubborn bulb remained. Quarterback Harry Stuhldreher reportedly knocked out the last one to cheers. Three years later, in 1927, the university officially adopted “The Fighting Irish” as the team’s nickname.
That same year, the Indiana Klan collapsed — largely because its leader was convicted of the rape and murder of a young woman named Madge Oberholtzer. The students won. The Klan lost.
For more:
Todd Tucker’s Notre Dame vs. The Klan — I have not read this one, but I’ve read interviews and articles about it, and I hear it is a good read.
Timothy Egan’s Fever in the Heartland —- this is where I first came across the story, and it reads like a novel even though he is a reliable researcher. It covers, I believe, a broader swathe of history than Tucker’s. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Notre Dame’s alum magazine has an article on this moment and on the exhibit at the university.
What’s Happening Right Now
The Southern Poverty Law Center documented a significant rise in active hate groups and white nationalist organizations between 2020 and 2025. But more concerning than street-level organizing (and not unrelated) is what is happening at the policy level.
The president has described immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country; it was a major talking point during his 2024 campaign, and recent changes to immigration policy reflect this worldview. The Department of Education’s civil rights enforcement division has been dramatically reduced. DEI programs — which exist specifically because documented discrimination persists — have been eliminated across the federal government.
The SPLC’s 2026 Intelligence Report documents specific incidents of harassment, intimidation, and violence tied to the documented rise in organized hate groups — including incidents targeting Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and immigrant communities. Their report is at splcenter.org. And the connections between hate crimes and violent policy are vivid—my whole 2024 series on Project 2025 illustrated that point.
The connections between dangerous political rhetoric, an increase in hate crimes, and a hostile legislative landscape might not often be discussed, but they’re well researched, and they’re very much in evidence today.
For more:
Politics of Belonging: Anti-Black Racism, Xenophobia, and Disinformation - Harvard Law Review
How hateful rhetoric connects to real-world violence - Brookings Institute
When politicians use hate speech, political violence increases - The Conversation
A Saint You Should Know
In 1954, a white couple in Louisville, Kentucky — Carl and Anne Braden — bought a house in an all-white neighborhood and transferred the deed to a Black couple, Andrew and Charlotte Wade, who had been unable to buy there themselves. Within weeks, a cross was burned on the lawn. Then a bomb destroyed the house. The Bradens were charged with sedition — accused of being Communists trying to stir up racial unrest. Carl went to prison. Anne wrote a book about it while being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. She could have stopped. She didn’t.
Anne Braden grew up in a segregated Alabama family. She spent the rest of her life building interracial solidarity in Appalachia, insisting that white Southerners had a particular responsibility to dismantle the system their ancestors built. She was called a Communist, a traitor, and a race traitor. She called herself a Southerner who finally understood what the South had done. She’s a familiar name to a lot of my white friends who have delved deep into the stories of movement ancestors who could offer them models for how to do anti-racism work, and yet she’s unfamiliar to most Americans.
Her work is carried forward today by the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee — the same institution that trained Rosa Parks and ran the Citizenship Schools Septima Clark built. In 2019, a fire destroyed the main building. In 2020, amid a surge of support, the center rebuilt. It is still running today, training organizers across the South, at highlandercenter.org. She was an extraordinary human and also a very regular one, and someone who worked to bring other extraordinary, ordinary people together for the fight, which is why I wanted to include her story this week.
For more:
Check out this bio from the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research at the University of Louisville
or this bio from Americans Who Tell the Truth
Good Trouble in Action
I’ve shared that going back to school in this period has been painful, and one of the most painful parts has been watching my and many other institutions of higher education actively seek to pit Muslim and Jewish students and faculty against each other in order to avoid letting students and faculty of many faiths (and of no particular faith) come together to oppose genocide. That’s why for this week, I wanted to share this story in order to remind myself of how often communities actually show up for each other, and show up together for others — even when the politicians and power brokers want to convince them to hate each other.
On February 11, 2025, more than 150 people representing 25 different congregations — Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Quaker — came together at Temple Beth Emeth in Ann Arbor to launch the Interfaith Fund for Immigrant Justice, raising $100,000 for the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center. Jewish congregations, a Quaker meeting, a Muslim community, Christian churches — all of them recognizing that their faith calls them to protect their neighbors, regardless of where those neighbors were born. They raised that money through Kugel Fests and Euchre tournaments. I love this country sometimes.
Source: Interfaith Coalition Rallies to Defend Immigrant Rights in Michigan - thejewishnews.com
Solidarity Is Already Happening
In January 2026, the Interfaith Alliance (where I got my first full-time advocacy job many years ago) hosted a Congressional briefing on Jewish-Muslim solidarity, naming something important: that Jewish Americans and Muslim Americans are both experiencing record levels of hate-motivated violence, both being scapegoated, and that the response has to be solidarity, not competition for victimhood. Jewish congregations standing outside mosques during Friday prayers after targeted harassment. Muslim communities raising $238,000 for Tree of Life shooting victims. Rabbis and imams hosting joint Shabbat and Iftar dinners. The Interfaith Alliance was explicit: we have real differences, and we can show up for each other when we are under attack.
That is the same logic as 1924. The Klan came to South Bend to divide — to make Catholics feel isolated, to make everyone who wasn’t white and Protestant feel like they were standing alone. The students who fought back were saying: you are not alone, and we will not be divided. Jewish and Muslim communities standing together in 2026 are saying exactly the same thing.
For more:
Jewish-Muslim Solidarity: Moral Witness in Pressing Times - The Interfaith Alliance (via Religion News Service)
Whether we show up with housing deeds, euchre tournaments, or potatoes, we have brought organized community to the battle convened by organized hate, and the outcome has never been predetermined. What determines it — what has always determined it — is whether enough people decide to show up together. You are showing up. That counts for so much. I’m grateful for it.
— Sandhy
a
Strong people don’t need strong leaders. Amen