Facing UW-Madison’s Racist Past

The campus reckons with KKK legacy

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Backstage at Memorial Union’s Fredric March Play Circle, members of the UW-Madison performance art collective Yoni Ki Baat were waiting to perform their annual showcase of songs, monologues and spoken-word poetry celebrating stories from women and nonbinary people of color.

But before the first act, the show’s host and creative co-director Anjali Misra took the microphone and issued a disclaimer. “The space that you are sitting in, that we are performing in, is named after someone with ties to the Ku Klux Klan,” she told the audience on April 26. “We consider this performance a reclamation of the space. We are reclaiming our stories here, and we are telling our stories from our perspectives. We have the floor.”

Three weeks earlier, UW-Madison had released a report on the little-known history of KKK groups at the university, examining two distinct student organizations that took the name between 1919 and 1926. Chancellor Rebecca Blank requested the review last fall in the wake of the deadly violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and asked researchers to conduct a review of this history to provide a framework for how to acknowledge and proceed “in light of the values the campus currently strives to maintain.”

The first was an honorary interfraternity society for juniors and seniors called Ku Klux Klan that was founded in 1919; the second was a housing fraternity called Kappa Beta Lambda — code for “Klansmen Be Loyal,” established in 1924. KBL was an explicitly white supremacist organization formed after the national Knights of the Ku Klux Klan began recruiting on campus, but less is known about the racial views of the honorary interfraternity society. However, it was a group of elite white men who were leaders on campus. It included prominent alumni like Hollywood actor Fredric March (then Frederick Bickel) and Porter Butts, director of the Memorial Union Director from 1926 to 1968, both of whom have rooms named after them in the Union. Other members included Thomas E. Brittingham Jr. and Walter Frautschi, who also have spaces on campus bearing their names.

That the university had ties to the KKK was no secret — it had been written about and discussed at several points over the decades — but it’s far from common knowledge on campus. To Misra and the members of Yoni Ki Baat, the revelation was “shocking and upsetting,” she says.

“Our group was pretty shaken up by the fact that we had been working in a space, performing in a space that was named after someone who had affiliation with a group that, from our understanding, is diametrically opposed to everything we stand for as a performing group and as individuals.”

Yoni Ki Baat members spent the weeks leading up to the performance discussing the report — and how they would respond. Ultimately the group decided to go on with the show. “I think it’s important that we continue to perform in this space,” says Misra, a UW-Madison graduate. “Reclaiming a space that seemingly doesn’t belong to you, or would exclude you, is an important step toward progress, toward making justice happen. We see it as honoring ourselves — we’re taking up space in a theater that was named after someone that was part of a group that didn’t think that we should have the same rights as them.”

Former UW-Madison student Adan Raed Abu-Hakmeh, a 2018 graduate who served as the Wisconsin Union Directorate vice president of internal relations, says she first heard rumors that the Union had spaces named for KKK members in 2016. She was initially pleased that the university had commissioned a study to investigate and clear up misconceptions, but she says the school’s response to student concerns has been dismissive and inadequate.

“It’s literally a hostile act,” she says of the decision to not immediately remove the names. “If you just sit outside the Porter Butts Gallery, every time a student of color walks by, they comment on it.”

Abu-Hakmeh has filed a hate and bias report with the university, charging that campus leadership “knowingly and deliberately contribute an active harm towards students, alumni, faculty, staff, and Union members by disregarding the importance of an urgent removal” of the names of KKK members from campus spaces. The document shows about 120 students have signed on the complaint as “affected members,” and about 270 people have registered support anonymously.

“These controlling entities did not believe that the emotions of these students were valid at face value,” she wrote in the complaint, obtained by Isthmus. “This disbelief is a hate and bias incident, as the people who are negatively affected are predominantly marginalized students, as well as allies to students who have had personal or familial history in a negative context to racial discrimination, anti-Semitic behavior, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, or fear as a result of oppression.”

Abu-Hakmeh has used social media to encourage others to file additional hate and bias reports, and she says she knows of at least 10 people who have done so. “I hope it makes the university acknowledge that it’s not just me, a dissenting student,” she says. “It’s a campus-wide issue.” She plans to continue to push for renaming the spaces even though she’s no longer a student, noting that there is no time limit on hate and bias complaints.

“This is something that seems so easy — just go to a wall with a crowbar and peel off the names,” she says. “That adds to the frustration. It would be such a simple act for students to feel safer and more welcome.”

America is in the midst of a reckoning with its racist past. Heated debates over the removal of Confederate monuments are happening in cities across the nation — Madison included — and more recently, there’s been a growing push to rename places and institutions that memorialize people with ties to slavery and bigotry.

W. Fitzhugh Brundage, chair of the history department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has lent his voice to the debates over Confederate monuments. A scholar of southern American history, race and collective memory, he’s not surprised that conversations have now expanded beyond monuments directly associated with slavery and white supremacy.

“I think this is happening in large part because many Americans feel that we live in a deeply dystopian moment,” he says. “There are reasons to be deeply pessimistic about racial equality in America.”

Brundage says he often hears people dismiss controversies over monuments or named spaces as insignificant, symbolic political posturing, but he believes the movement provides a tangible way for people who feel politically disempowered to push for social and institutional change.

“I think this is an environment in which people feel like they are fighting about something important,” he says. “Fighting over cultural symbols feels like a way to grapple with one immediate, accessible manifestation of all the things you’re worried about happening in America.”

UW-Madison’s report gave no recommendation on the question of renaming the spaces, instead urging the campus community to first reckon with the “pervasive culture of racial and religious bigotry, casual and unexamined in its prevalence, in which exclusion and indignity were routine, sanctioned in the institution’s daily life, and unchallenged by its leaders.” But they did propose several actionable items, including a project to “recover the voices” of those who have endured “a climate of hostility” on campus and who sought to change it, and proposed a renewed commitment to the Department of Afro-American Studies and the Programs in American Indian Studies, Chican@/Latin@ Studies and Asian-American Studies.

“[A]ny focus on the renaming of particular campus facilities [should] follow rather than precede the work of substantial institutional change to acknowledge and address the legacies of that era,” the authors wrote.

Still, members of the ad-hoc study group kept returning to what they began to refer to as “the names question” — should the names of individuals associated with a group named “Ku Klux Klan” be removed from the campus landscape? Or do their contributions to society outweigh a brief affiliation with a group that was a product of its time?

Butts’ daughter, Sherrill Randall, grew up at Memorial Union. She has fond memories of trying on costumes backstage at the Union theater and spending time in the dynamic space that her father played a central role in creating. She was “devastated” when she learned via media reports about the study and the plan to cover her father’s name — university officials opted not to contact her family prior to its release. “For years, we heard about all these wonderful contributions that my dad has made to the Union, and then suddenly he’s being looked at in a very different light,” she says.

Randall believes the report, and the resulting media coverage, misrepresents her father’s views and has unfairly tarnished his legacy. “My father created [the Union] as a multicultural center,” Randall says. “He was always so welcoming of people of different ethnicities and races and religions. We were brought up that way in our family.”

She was also frustrated that the report did not include information on the individuals associated with KKK groups. So in recent weeks, she has been searching through documents in the University Archives at Steenbock Library hoping to shed light on the timeline of her father’s involvement with the KKK group as well as any indication of his views on race during that period. She also looked through old editorials from the Daily Cardinal, where her father was a reporter and editor.

She says she found nothing suggesting that her father was a racist. To the contrary, she found an editorial from March 1924, Butts’ senior year, titled “Undesirable and Unneeded,” that denounced the national KKK, which had begun recruiting on campus. “It professes to stand for good citizenship, decency and true Americanism, but even so, it is far from representing any one of those qualities,” the editorial reads. “Americanism, decency and good citizenship are not symbolized by masks, secrecy, and terrorism. They are not to be attained by mystery, and by inspiration of fear and inter-class hatred.” There is no byline on the editorial, but since Butts was managing editor, he either approved the piece or wrote it himself. “It is very clear that he was not supporting the KKK,” Randall says.

Ted Crabb, who succeeded Butts as Union director from 1968 to 2001, also went digging in the archives searching for answers about his friend and mentor. “Knowing Porter, we did talk a lot about the Union as an open place, as a place that reached out to everybody,” Crabb says. He remembers how Butts insisted that the Union stay open over holiday break so that international students who were unable to go home could have a place to dine and socialize. He also points to the Union’s early music programming — artists of color including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong all performed during Butts’ tenure.

Crabb is further convinced that Butts was not technically a member of the KKK — even though Butts’ name and photograph appear plainly on the organization’s page in the 1924 Badger yearbook. A 1922 article in The Capital Times notes that Butts was nominated for induction into the honorary KKK — suggesting he had no problem with the association. He became a member in 1923, and the organization’s name changed from KKK to Tumas in April of that year. “We changed the name of the organization because so many people confused it with the name of a non-collegiate secret organization of the same name,” its president told the Daily Cardinal at the time.

“In my mind, this is a very significant point,” Crabb says. “[They] recognized there was a conflict with the national KKK and didn’t want any part in that, so they immediately acted to change the name.”

There’s no ambiguity as to whether Fredric March was a member of the honorary KKK — he’s pictured on the organization’s page in the 1921 Badger. (Confusingly, that year the group’s name is spelled Klu Klux Klan). However, March’s activities later in life suggested progressive political leanings. In 1936 he co-founded the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and in 1938 he was investigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In 1964, he and his wife hosted a benefit for the NAACP. “He championed liberal causes,” Crabb says. “What does that count for?”

Crabb warns against judging previous generations by today’s standards. He points to other spaces bearing the names of KKK members, including Frautschi Point and the Brittingham House — should those be scrutinized also? There are other places on campus named for people with deeply problematic views — former UW President Paul Chadbourne opposed the co-education of women; President Charles Van Hise championed eugenics. And what about spaces named for other people whose misdeeds have yet to be unearthed? “It reminds me of the era I grew up in — the McCarthy Era, when there was guilt by association,” Crabb says of the controversy. “That’s not to say that the national KKK wasn’t a horrible group, but there’s this problem — why did [the campus KKK] select this name?”

The answer to that question is perhaps unknowable — all the members are likely now dead, and researchers found no evidence that the interfraternity honorary society was associated with the racist Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which was founded by William Joseph Simmons in 1915 as a reboot of the terrorist Reconstruction Era Klan, which was founded by Confederate veterans. However, the timing suggests the UW-Madison Klan knew about the national group — and its ideology — and had no problem with sharing the name. By all accounts, the honorary campus Klan was an above-ground, university-sanctioned organization that drew no objections from anyone on campus.

But according to historian Linda Gordon, a former UW-Madison professor who now teaches at New York University, that’s exactly what the national KKK was during those years — a normal, ubiquitous, completely acceptable social club akin to the Elks or the Moose or the Masons. “At that time, unfortunately, the KKK was entirely respectable,” she says. “And they were not unusual.”

Gordon recently published a book, The Second Coming of the KKK, that explores the rise of the group during the 1910s and 1920s, and its downfall in the 1940s. (The third iteration of the Klan, still active today, emerged in the 1950s and 1960s in response to the Civil Rights Movement). Her findings contradict stereotypes of the Klan as an ideological fringe group of rural, southern racists. In reality, the second Klan existed mainly in the north — its highest per-capita state memberships were in Indiana and Oregon — and its members were mostly well-educated, middle-class Americans. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the single biggest employment of Klan members was police officers and sheriff’s deputies. “A lot of police forces literally deputized Klan members,” she says. The organization was completely ingrained into American culture — it helped elect pro-Klan candidates to political office, sponsored baseball teams, hosted county fairs and held beauty pageants in which young women competed for the title of “Miss 100 Percent America.”

In writing about the second Klan, Gordon chose her words carefully. She describes it as a bigoted organization rather than an explicitly racist one, simply because at that time there were very few people of color living in areas where the Klan was prevalent. The bigotry was instead directed at immigrants, Catholics and Jews. “Prejudice was widespread in the country at that time,” she says. “Even among people who hated the Klan.”

Gordon’s research draws alarming parallels between the second Klan and the current-day resurgence of bigotry and white supremacy evidenced by the rise of alt-right and neo-Nazi groups like those that marched — and committed deadly violence — in Charlottesville last year. The Trump administration has given a platform to alt-right figures who tacitly champion white nationalism and has instituted hardline anti-immigrant policies. People of color continue to suffer under systems of mass incarceration and other forms of institutionalized racism. Many citizens are openly hostile to immigrants, especially from Latin America and Muslim-majority countries. And many who today espouse bigoted views claim to be patriots. “Just like people [in the 1920s] did not feel like there was anything wrong with their suspicion of Jews,” Gordon says, “people today are saying, ‘We’re not really racist, but we just can’t trust those people.’”

Sociologist Kathleen Blee interviewed surviving members of the 1920s Klan and found that many of the members categorically denied that it was a racist organization, insisting that it was just a social club. “They may have been lying, or they may have unconsciously rewritten their memories — people do that all the time,” Gordon says. “And that’s a bad thing — it wasn’t just another club.”

The Union Council is meeting throughout the summer to prepare for its decision on renaming the Porter Butts Gallery and the Fredric March Play Circle. The vote is expected to happen by December. University Archives staff are also working over the summer to create comprehensive biographical studies on both men. An Isthmus review of archival documents provided few additional clues to their racial views, but there were a few relevant revelations.

In addition to his editorial role at the Daily Cardinal, Butts was on staff at the Octopus humor magazine — a publication that during Butts’ time on campus published explicitly racist cartoons. On a 1949 faculty information sheet submitted to the University News Service, Butts listed an array of honorary fraternities, societies and clubs he’d been a part of, including Alpha Tau Omega and the secret society Iron Cross. But he left off Ku Klux Klan — and Tumas.

Gordon says this omission is significant. “It’s absolutely telling,” she says. “It became stigmatized, and it’s a good thing that it became stigmatized.”

There’s less information in the archives on March — his file mostly contains press clippings about his Hollywood career, but one biographical document referenced a magazine feature written about March claiming that the actor “pursued D.W. Griffith, to the director’s extreme annoyance.” Griffith famously directed Birth of a Nation, an explicitly racist film that glorified the Ku Klux Klan.

“None of the newspaper articles held by the University Archives and reviewed for this project indicate Bickel’s affiliation with the student organization Klu Klux Klan, which is interesting to note given many that focus on this period of his life provide detailed accounts of his undergraduate activities,” the biographical document says.

Many of Butts’ writings preserved in the archives involve the Wisconsin Union, its role on campus and the larger issue of college unions in general — a national movement that he helped popularize. He championed the idea that students needed a place to gather for socializing, intellectual debate, cultural enrichment and leadership opportunities.

Butts did write about March and his connection to the KKK, responding to a question submitted to Wisconsin Alumnus in November 1975: “When March attended the University there were three interfraternity social organizations: Skull and Crescent and Innergate for sophomores, and Ku Klux Klan for juniors. In a sense they substituted for what is now the Inter-Fraternity Council. In the spring of 1922 and 1923, Ku Klux Klan was listed in the Badger as a ‘Junior Inter-Fraternity Social Society.’ This was the last time,” Butts wrote. “The members inducted into the Society in the spring of 1923 thought the name was curious, irrelevant, and very unfortunate. So the name was changed at that time to ‘Tumas.’”

Butts’ statement is factually incorrect — there were many more than three interfraternity societies, and there was also an established Interfraternity Council at that time. Butts also fails to acknowledge that he himself was a member.

Only one document offered insight into his personal views on the human condition — an interview from 1949 that appears to have been conducted by a student in the journalism school. The piece is purportedly about career advice, but the quotations are surprisingly relevant to the reevaluation of Butts’ legacy.

“I’ve seen lots of students change right here in the Union,” Butts said. “They come in not caring for anybody. Then they join a Union committee, just to see what it’s like, and pretty soon they learn that they’ve been missing a lot of the pleasures that good personal relationships bring. It’s never too late to change. That’s not saying that it’s easy to alter your attitudes toward people. It may not happen overnight, but from my own observations, people change rapidly and much.”