Timeline – 2018 – History Professors Report on the KKK at the UW

In the aftermath of white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and amidst ongoing controversies about Confederate monuments, UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank assembled a study group to investigate Ku Klux Klan-related activities on the UW campus in the 1920s and to recommend steps that the campus might take to acknowledge that history. History professor Stephen Kantrowitz co-chaired the committee, on which Christy Clark-Pujara, an affiliated member of the History faculty, also served.

Released in the spring of 2018, their report recommended that the campus take steps to “recover and acknowledge the history of exclusion” on the UW-Madison campus and that it “recommit the university’s resources to a more inclusive present.”

A copy of the report is available here (pdf). UW Digital Collections offers an online exhibit on “The Ku Klux Klan in Northwestern Wisconsin, circa 1915-1950,” which includes links to related collections.

Sources: “UW-Madison Releases Report,” UW News, April 19, 2018.