INDIANAPOLIS Nearly 100 years before the Me Too movement encouraged women to speak up about sexual assault and harassment by powerful men, Indiana Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon and state political power broker D.C. Stephenson was brought down by a 28-year-old woman from Indianapolis’ east side who only wanted to teach rural Hoosiers how to read.

Now, there is a mural on a wall on East Washington Street in Irvington to honor that young woman.

Madge Oberholtzer was a graduate of what was essentially her neighborhood college, Butler University in Irvington, which was literally located down the street from the mansion where Stephenson ran his statewide racist movement with plans of going to Washington, the halls of Congress and beyond.

Charlotte Ottinger, an Irvington historian, said Stephenson even had his sights set on the White House.

”And he had been interviewed back in the 1950s when he was still in prison, and he said, when somebody asked him point blank, ‘Were you really intending to get to the White House?’ and he said, ‘Yes, but if I had gotten there, it probably wouldn’t be called a president anymore.’”

Ottinger wrote a book titled, “Madge: The Life and Times of Madge Oberholtzer, the Young Irvington Woman Who Brought Down D.C. Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan.”

”In that era, women didn’t speak out about sexual crimes or assaults, and for her to be willing to make it public with all the details in order to stop D.C. Stephenson was a pretty remarkable thing,” said Ottinger. ”She obviously had other ambitions that didn’t include marriage and a family, which puts her at the forefront of that generation of women who were ahead of the curve trying to become independent and self-reliant.”

Oberholtzer was a state employee tasked with putting books in the hands of rural Hoosiers who may not have had access to a library or schooling in their farming communities.

Then as now, educators needed powerful voices at the Statehouse to support their programs and budgets, and there was no voice louder and more commanding in Indiana than that of Stephenson, a charlatan and con artist who arrived in Evansville in the early 1920s and began paying ministers to preach the sermon of the Klan from their pulpits.

”I think he saw the Klan as a mechanism to earn money and power,” said Ottinger, recalling that uneducated state residents who feared immigrants, the Pope, the Catholic Church, Jews and African Americans and were ripe for the racist message Stephenson was quite literally peddling. ”He sold the Klan to the ministers who then took it into the church and then further to the congregations, and he was making about $6 off of every outfit and additional money off of every membership that he sold.”

Stephenson became a multi-millionaire, and all that money and local support landed him a seat at the table when Edward Jackson, a lawyer from Lafayette, was moving up through state government on his way to being elected governor in 1924.

”He had already given quite a lot of money to Ed Jackson’s campaign, gave him a car for his campaign,” Ottinger said. “So, he basically bought his way into the election and the governor’s position.”

Stephenson had sources, law enforcement and elected officials in his pocket all across the state, as historians estimate perhaps a third of all men in Indiana in the 1920s were members of the KKK.

His empire was run out of a fine mansion in Irvington, just down the street from Butler University, where Madge Oberholtzer grew up and went to school.

”The neighborhood was aware that he was having a number of not real great parties there,” said Ottinger, squirming at the description of the abuse and lawlessness that Stephenson would oversee and direct. “They saw them bringing in cases of liquor, women coming and going all hours of the night. He had assaulted other women but none of them had ever come forward. People who worked for him were aware of these acts of debauchery that he had in his home and nobody would speak up about it.

”Everybody turned a blind eye.”

At Governor Jackson’s inaugural banquet, Oberholtzer was seated next to Stephenson, perhaps at the suggestion of Jackson’s wife.

Over the next couple months, there had been only a couple encounters between the young woman intent on teaching reading and the kingmaker in a hood.

On the night of March 15, 1925, Oberholtzer was summoned to Stepheson’s mansion, likely, she thought, to talk about her reading project, as the power broker said he was leaving town on a train to Chicago the next day.

“I love you more than any woman I have ever known,” Stephenson told her.

Oberholtzer was plied with liquor, possibly drugged, and taken to Union Station to be put on that train with Stephenson and his henchmen.

Ottinger said Oberholtzer never made it across state lines.

”Stephenson molested her, raped her, bit her all over her body,” Ottinger said. “She was in shock basically, and he shuttled her off to the hotel in Hammond after they arrived there.”

Ottinger said after the young woman had been brutalized, she was essentially held captive in a hotel room by Stephenson’s men.

”She also knew how powerful he was, and he had said many times that he was the law in Indiana,” Ottinger said. “She may not have known who he had under his thumb and who she could trust.”

Oberholtzer convinced a Stephenson associate to drive her to a pharmacy where she purchased bichloride of mercury and swallowed six tablets.

She was so sickened by the poison that Stephenson agreed to take her back to Irvington where she was eventually delivered home to her parents.

Over the next 30 days, Oberholtzer’s condition worsened, first by the injuries done to her by Stephenson and then by the poison she had taken.

It was then that the young woman, in courage rare then and now, called for a family lawyer and a friend and told them her story.

”They called her family lawyer in and Asa Smith, the lawyer, and Madge’s friend Ermina, sat down multiple times with her and wrote down everything that she described about the crime, and that’s how they came to write the dying declaration,” said Ottinger.

Stephenson had warned Oberholtzer that, “You must forget this, what is done has been done. I am the law and the power.”

Oberholtzer was told to tell her family she had been injured in a car accident.

”He’s denying the crime or blaming other people for it,” said Ottinger, who has read Oberholtzer’s dying declaration. “At one point, he said he knew who did it but he would never tell who it was because it was a friend of his and he’s going, I think, about his business thinking he was going scot free and no one would ever be able to pin this on him.”

Oberholtzer died on April 15, 1925, after giving and proofreading her statement.

Months later, Stephenson was charged with murder, and his trial was moved to Hamilton County and its courthouse, nearly 30 miles away from the Klansman’s seat of power in downtown Indianapolis.

“They even said the people on the jury in Noblesville, some of them were members of the Klan, at least the original part of the Klan, and they said there are Klansmen on the jury, but they don’t believe in murder,” said Ottinger. ”I think there was enough groundswell from the public when they really found out what was going on behind the scenes of the KKK and Stephenson’s life. I think they all banded behind Madge and wanted to see justice.”

Stephenson was convicted of second degree murder and went to prison for 30 years.

Governor Jackson served only one term and left the Statehouse in scandal, investigated for an alleged attempt to bribe his predecessor to name Klan-endorsed candidates to high-ranking state offices.

While Stephenson’s crimes and thwarted influence were immediately known and relegated to the dark disgrace of Hoosier history, Oberholtzer’s own reputation was battered about in the decades after her death.

“Over the years, people tried to have a different opinion of Madge and tried to do the victim shaming of, ‘why was she there, why did she go on this train trip,’ and completely forgetting what the original story was,” said Ottinger. ”I think, in retrospect, people realize what a huge thing she did by making this statement because he had made it very clear that he wanted to get to the White House.”

The Ku Klux Klan was riding high in America during and after World War I, experiencing a resurgence across the country that was no more sweeping and robust than in the State of Indiana, where a demagogue enriched himself while he seized power and bent entire political systems to his will.

Maybe Stephenson would have eventually been discovered as the craven fraud predator that he was, but it took the courage and sacrifice of a young liberated woman from Indianapolis’ east side who stood up against evil while the rest of Indiana laid down 100 years ago.

That’s why Oberholtzer had a mural dedicated to her memory in Irvington on the date of her death.

”I think its also part of a social justice movement to show that it is OK to speak out against injustices in our world and our country,” Ottinger said. “And finally Madge got the attention she deserved for what she did.”

More information on Oberholtzer’s story is available here, here and here.