College of Arts and Sciences Newsroom

By Dave Larsen

University of Dayton historian William Trollinger doesn’t limit his lectures to the classroom. As an Ohio humanities speaker, he delivers talks about the Ohio Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; and the ongoing debate about Confederate monuments and flags at schools, libraries and museums statewide.

Trollinger, a professor of history and former director of the College of Arts and Sciences’ Core program, enjoys speaking with people who aren’t academics but are interested in learning about these topics.

“What’s really gratifying about it is that people want to know,” he said. “People read about it or see an ad in the local paper and they show up. We have a great conversation. So, it’s not scholarship for scholars — it’s public scholarship.”

In September, Trollinger gave a special version of his talk, Terrorizing Catholics, Jews and Immigrants: The Ohio Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, on campus at the Roger Glass Center for the Arts. His address was part of a panel discussion about the fight against hate in Ohio, organized by Samuel Dorf, Alumni Chair in the Humanities.

During the early 1920s, the “second” Ku Klux Klan had an estimated 5 million members, with most of them in the Midwest, Trollinger said. In Dayton, its focus was on Catholics — particularly the University of Dayton.

As Trollinger detailed in his award-winning 2013 essay, Hearing the Silence: The University of Dayton, the Ku Klux Klan, and Catholic Universities and Colleges, the Klan’s message was “Catholics are not American.” UD’s administration, like those at other Catholic institutions at the time, wanted this problem to disappear.

“They did not respond until there was a bombing on campus,” he said. “In December 1923, the Klan set off 12 bombs and the administration responded to that, especially because one of the bombs went off near the ROTC building, which had weaponry in there. It could have been a disaster.”

Trollinger said these episodes “disappeared” from the official institutional histories of UD and other Catholic institutions but can be found in the pages of the Dayton Daily News and other newspaper archives from the early 1920s.

“I had known about this bit of UD history for a while, thanks to conversations with Bill,” Dorf said. “It seemed only natural to share this story in the context of what people across the state of Ohio are doing today to combat hate.”

The Glass Center event also featured a roundtable with Kelly Fishman from the Anti-Defamation League’s Cleveland office; David Whitehead, vice president of the Cincinnati NAACP; and Fr. Satish Joseph of the Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception Church in Dayton.

Trollinger has given his Klan talk more than 20 times across the state through the Ohio Humanities Speakers Bureau, which provides scholars in the fields of history, literature, philosophy, law and archaeology to schools and nonprofit organizations. Nearly every time he’s given it, someone comes up afterward and tells him about finding a Klan robe when cleaning out a late relative’s closet.

“Of course, they didn’t know that about their family history until grandpa died or whatever, and they find it,” Trollinger said. “I’m able to put that into context to explain what was going on to hopefully help them through it. ‘Hey, grandpa was in the Klan. Well, you know, these were the times and that sort of thing.’”

Trollinger, who has dual appointments in the UD departments of history and religious studies, has been an Ohio humanities speaker since 2017. His wife, UD Professor of English Susan Trollinger, also is a speaker, giving talks on the Amish and women’s suffrage movement.

He said their audiences and the people who stay after their talks to engage with them goes against the narrative of the humanities being irrelevant or inherently less valuable than STEM degrees.

“It’s a little frustrating to hear language about the humanities, because I want to say, ‘Come with me out on these Ohio humanities talks and listen to how people respond,’” he said. “This matters to them. They are interested. They’re not scholars. They’re just everyday people who want to know this information.”

Trollinger equates that experience to teaching in UD’s Core program — an innovative, interdisciplinary curriculum that emphasizes connections between academic disciplines. Students in the two-and-a-half-year program take a sequence of courses in the humanities, arts and social sciences around a common theme: human values in a pluralistic culture.

“We get students who don’t think they like history or theology or whatever,” he said. “I start teaching and we start talking about subjects, and all of a sudden they’re all in.”

In May, Trollinger stepped down after 11 years as Core program director. He was succeeded by Elizabeth Ann Mackay, associate professor of English. He continues to teach the first-year Core course and graduate-level religious studies courses, in addition to directing theology doctoral dissertations.

Trollinger plans to turn his attention to several writing projects, including a second edition of his first book, God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism, as well as a new book project with Susan focused on women who served as fundamentalist ministers and evangelists during the early 20th century. The couple’s previous collaboration is Righting America at the Creation Museum.

Mackay credits Trollinger’s leadership and direction for transforming Core into “UD’s premiere program for integrated learning and living.”

“Fostering a vocation of learning has been Bill’s underlying, unstated aim with his direction of the Core program,” she said. “Unstated, but it always shows up, especially in the ways our students who graduate from the program wax nostalgic about the program and its first-year course.”