They were one of the first American fraternal societies not to prohibit black membership in their constitution. During World War I, with the slogan “Everybody Welcome, Everything Free” atop their doors, they managed the only racially integrated facilities available to American troops, three decades before the U.S. military integrated its ranks.

And they were described by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s as “the organization most interested” in the Klan’s destruction. I write of the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic fraternal society named after a long-dead European whom many woke activists now call, erroneously and often maliciously, a “racist murderer.”