William Stetson Kennedy was an
American author and
human rights activist died he was 94.. One of the pioneer
folklore collectors during the first half of the 20th century, he is remembered for having infiltrated the
Ku Klux Klan
in the 1940s, exposing its secrets to authorities and the outside
world. His actions led to the 1947 revocation by the state of Georgia of
the Klan's national corporate charter.
[1] Kennedy wrote or co-wrote ten books.
(October 5, 1916 – August 27, 2011)
Biography and activities
Kennedy was named for a member of his mother's family, the hatter
John Batterson Stetson.
[1]
As a teenager, he began collecting folklore material while seeking "a
dollar down and dollar a week" accounts for his father, a furniture
merchant. While a student at the
University of Florida, Kennedy befriended one of his professors, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
[2]
In 1937, he left the University of Florida to join the
WPA Florida Writers' Project, and at the age of 21, was put in charge of folklore,
oral history, and
ethnic studies. As her supervisor, Kennedy traveled throughout Florida with African-American novelist and folklorist
Zora Neale Hurston, visiting turpentine camps near
Cross City and the
Clara White Mission soup kitchen in Jacksonville. Hurston later chronicled these experiences in her book
Mules and Men. The two were forced to travel separately because
Jim Crow
laws prohibited them from working together. Because of segregation laws
operative in Florida at the time, "You could get killed lighting
someone's cigarette", Kennedy told independent producer Barrett Golding.
"Or shaking hands -- both colors, white and black."
[3] Hurston was not even allowed to enter the
Federal Writers' Project
office in Jacksonville through the front door and did most of her work
from her home. Kennedy had a large hand in editing several volumes
generated by the Florida project, including The WPA
Guide to Florida: the Southernmost State (1939), from the famed WPA
American Guide Series,
A Guide to Key West, and
The Florida Negro (part of a series directed by
Sterling Brown). Kennedy also studied at New College for Social Research in New York and at the Sorbonne in Paris.
[2]
Stetson Kennedy cuts the cake for his 93rd birthday party (two days before the actual birthday) at the
Civic Media Center in Gainesville, Florida.
Kennedy's first book,
Palmetto Country, based on unused material collected during his WPA period, was published in 1942 as a volume in the
American Folkways Series edited by
Erskine Caldwell. Legendary folklorist
Alan Lomax has said of the book, "I very much doubt that a better book about
Florida folklife will ever be written." To which Kennedy's self-described "stud buddy",
Woody Guthrie, added, "[
Palmetto Country]
gives me a better trip and taste and look and feel for Florida than I
got in the forty-seven states I've actually been in body and
tramped
in boot." The Library of Congress has placed the recordings and
pictures from the project online. Kennedy has been called "one of the
pioneer folklore collectors during the first half of the 20th century",
and his work is a keystone of the library's presentation.
In 1942 Kennedy accepted a position as Southeastern Editorial Director of the
CIO's Political Action Committee in
Atlanta, Georgia, in which capacity he wrote a series of monographs dealing with the
poll tax,
white primaries,
and other restrictions on voting that delimited democracy throughout
the South. Kept from military service by a bad back, Kennedy resolved to
perform his patriotic duties in Georgia by infiltrating both the Klan
and the Columbians,
[4] an Atlanta-based neo-Nazi organization.
[5]
After World War II, Kennedy worked as a journalist for the liberal newspaper
PM. His stories appeared in newspapers and magazines such as the
New York Post and
The Nation, for which he was for a time Southern correspondent, and he fed information about discrimination to columnist
Drew Pearson.
To bring the effects of Jim Crow in the South to public awareness, he
authored a number exposés of the Klan and racist Jim Crow system over
the course of his life, including
Southern Exposure (1946),
Jim Crow Guide to the USA (1959), and
After Appomattox: How the South Won the War
(1995). During the 1950s, Kennedy's books, considered too incendiary to
be published in the USA, were published in France by the existentialist
philosopher
Jean-Paul Sartre[6] and subsequently translated into other languages. Kennedy coined the term "Frown Power",
[7]
when he started a campaign with that name in the 1940s, which simply
encouraged people to pointedly frown when they heard bigoted speech.
In 1947, Kennedy provided information - including secret codewords and details of Klan rituals - to the writers of the
Superman radio program, leading popular journalist
Stephen J. Dubner and
University of Chicago economist
Steven Levitt, in their 2005 book
Freakonomics, to dub Kennedy "the greatest single contributor to the weakening of the Ku Klux Klan".
[8]
The result was a series of 16 episodes in which Superman took on the
Klan. Kennedy intended to strip away the Klan's mystique; and the
trivialization of the Klan's rituals and codewords likely had a negative
impact on Klan recruiting and membership.
[9]
In 1952, when Kennedy ran for governor of Florida, his friend and
houseguest Woody Guthrie wrote a set of lyrics for a campaign song,
"Stetson Kennedy".
[10]
Kennedy says he became "the most hated man in Florida", and his home at
Fruit Cove near Lake Beluthahatchee was firebombed by rightists and
many of his papers destroyed, causing him to leave the country and go to
live in
France. There, in 1954, Kennedy wrote his sensational exposé of the workings of the Klan,
I Rode With The Ku Klux Klan (later reissued as
The Klan Unmasked), which was published by
Jean-Paul Sartre.
Questioned in later years about the accuracy of his account, Kennedy
later said he regretted not having included an explanatory introduction
to the book about how the information in it was obtained.
[11]
The director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress
Peggy Bulger, the subject of whose doctoral thesis was Kennedy's work
as a folklorist, commented in a 2007 interview with The Associated
Press, "Exposing their folklore – all their secret handshakes, passwords
and how silly they were, dressing up in white sheets ... If they
weren't so violent, they would be silly."
[1]
A founding member and past president of the
Florida Folklore Society, Kennedy was a recipient of the 1998
Florida Folk Heritage Award
and the Florida Governor's Heartland Award. His contribution to the
preservation and propagation of folk culture is the subject of a
dissertation,
"Stetson Kennedy: Applied Folklore and Cultural Advocacy" (
University of Pennsylvania, 1992), by
Peggy Bulger, who assumed the directorship of the
American Folklife Center at the
Library of Congress in 1999. Kennedy is also featured as one of the "Whistle Blowers", in
Studs Terkel's book
Coming of Age, published in 1995.
In 2005, Jacksonville residents attended a banquet in honor of
Kennedy's life, and afterward a slide show with narration at Henrietta's
Restaurant, located at 9th and Main Street in
Springfield. This event was largely coordinated by
Fresh Ministries. The slides included numerous pictures of his travels with author
Zora Neale Hurston, and direct voice recordings which were later digitized for preservation.
In 2006, on November 24, the ninety-year-old Kennedy was wed to
former city commissioner Sandra Parks at a Quaker-style ceremony at the
William Bartram Center on the
Bolles School in Jacksonville, Florida.
[12]
Parks and Kennedy met when she came to Beluthahatchee to recruit him
for the 40th anniversary observance of the St. Augustine civil rights
marches which he participated in with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Kennedy, who admits to at least five previous marriages, commented,
"I’ll leave it to the historians to decide how many times I’ve been
married."
[13]
In 2007
St. Johns County declared a "Stetson Kennedy Day".
[14]
Kennedy participated in the two-day
New Deal Resources: Preserving the Legacy conference at the
Library of Congress on the occasion of the 75th Anniversary of the
New Deal held in March 2008.
[15] Kennedy's most recent book,
Grits and Grunts: Folkloric Key West, was issued by the Pineapple Press, in 2008.
In February 2009, Kennedy bequeathed his personal library to the
Civic Media Center in Gainesville, Florida with which Kennedy had worked since the center's inception.
[16]
In October 2009, a first party for Kennedy's 93rd birthday was held
at the Civic Media Center and the next day admirers flocked to
Beluthahatchee Park, now a landmarked historic site, to celebrate
Kennedy's birthday there.
[17]
Beluthahatchee Park
Sign on Stetson Kennedy's residence erected consequent to the 2003
designation of Beluthahatchee as a Literary Landmark, No. 83 in the
National Register. (An additional marker, in Kennedy's name, was also
approved, to be erected following his demise.)
In 2003, Friends of Libraries USA put Beluthahatchee on its national
register of literary sites and, to commemorate the occasion,
Arlo Guthrie gave a concert in Jacksonville.
[18]
In 2005 Kennedy received a
life estate on his 4 acre homestead in
Saint Johns County, and it is now Beluthahatchee Park.
[19]
The name "Beluthahatchee" describes a mythical "Florida Shangri-la,
where all unpleasantness is forgiven and forgotten" according to Zora
Neale Hurston.
[20]
Among the amenities are a picnic pavilion, canoe dock, access to the
Beluthatchee Lake, and use of the two wildlife observation platforms. A
“Mother Earth Trail” throughout the property is planned, as envisioned
by the Kennedy Foundation. The Park’s perimeter is surrounded by a heavy
canopy of native vegetation and the enclave provides a habitat for
wildlife and continues to serve as a rookery and roosting place for many
types of waterfowl and other birds.
Kennedy’s home will, upon his death, be open as a museum and archive
and offer educational exhibits and whatnot, primarily about Woody
Guthrie and William Bartram in addition to Kennedy himself, and will be
operated by the Kennedy Foundation which will share office space in an
adjacent home with the William Bartram Scenic and Historic Highway
corridor group. A log cabin that's in the park may serve as a caretaker
residence while the fourth building there may house an
Artist-in-Residence through the Florida Folklife program.
[21]
The park is part of a 70 acre tract that Kennedy purchased in 1948,
recorded restrictive covenants setting aside land in perpetuity as a
wildlife refuge, and the following year subdivided, subsequently selling
all but his own 4 acre parcel.
[19]
Critical assessments from his peers
In 1999, a freelance historian, Ben Green, alleged that Kennedy falsified or misrepresented portions of
I Rode With The Ku Klux Klan.
During the 1990s, Green had enlisted Kennedy's help while researching a
book about the still unsolved 1951 Florida fire-bombing murders of
black
Civil Rights activists
Harry T. Moore and his wife Harriette. Green's book about the Moores,
Freedom Never Dies,
was published in 1999. Green and Kennedy, quarreled over what Kennedy
considered Green's too sympathetic portrayal of the FBI. Green, whose
book is generally disparaging of Kennedy, claimed to have examined
Kennedy's archives at the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and in Atlanta and concluded that a number of interviews, portrayed in
I Rode With The Ku Klux Klan
as having been conducted undercover, had in fact been done openly, and
that racist material amassed by Kennedy had also been openly obtained
from mail subscriptions to the Klan and similar groups and not
surreptitiously, as implied. Most seriously, Green accused Kennedy of
concealing the existence of a collaborator, referred to as "John Brown"
(a pseudonym probably chosen in honor of the 19th-century abolitionist
John Brown),
whom Green alleged was in fact responsible for the most daring of
Kennedy's undercover revelations. Green also interviewed Georgia State
Prosecutor Dan Duke, whom he reported as denying having worked with
Kennedy as closely the latter had claimed. "Duke agreed that Kennedy
'got inside of some [Klan] meetings' but openly disputed Kennedy's
dramatized account of their relationship. 'None of that happened,'
[Duke] told Green", according to Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt
in their
New York Times Magazine column of January 8, 2006.
[22] In the same column, Levitt and Dubner also quote Jim Clark, a professor at the
University of Central Florida
and co-author of a PBS television documentary based on Green's book, as
saying that "[Kennedy] built a national reputation on many things that
didn't happen". Jim Clark and Ben Green collaborated on the script of
Freedom Never Dies: The Story of Harry T. Moore,
[23] based on Green's book and partially funded by the
Freedom Forum.
[24] Peggy Bulger, on the other hand, stated that when she interviewed him: "[Sheriff] Duke laughed about the way
The Klan Unmasked
was written. But he added that Kennedy 'didn't do it all, but he did
plenty,' she said. In a letter to Kennedy dated July 27, 1946, Georgia
Gov. Ellis Arnall wrote: 'You have my permission to quote me as making
the following observation: Documentary evidence uncovered by Stetson
Kennedy has facilitated Georgia's prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan.'"
[11]
Freakonomics
authors Dubner and Levitt had included a favorable summary of Kennedy's
anti-Klan activities with special emphasis on the events recounted in
I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan
in the 2005 edition of their bestselling book. In the revised 2006
edition, after being contacted by Green, they retracted their earlier
admiration, claiming that they had been "hoodwinked".
[22] The allegations in their retraction were swiftly repeated by the business journal
Forbes in a review of the revised edition of
Freakonomics:
"It turns out that Kennedy doesn't quite live up to his own legend. In
fact, he had exaggerated his story for decades and credited himself with
actions taken by other people".
Green's insinuations are contested by scholars, who emphasize that
Kennedy never concealed that he had protected his colleagues' identities
and maintain that Green either misread or did not really read the
material at the Schomburg Center.
Peggy Bulger, the head of the American Folklife Division of the
Library of Congress,
who wrote her Ph. D. dissertation on Kennedy and interviewed him
extensively, maintains that Kennedy was always candid with her and
others about his combination of two narratives into one in
I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan:
"His purpose was to expose the Klan to a broad reading audience and use
their folklore against them, which he did." In a letter to the editor
of
New York Times Magazine
(published on January 22, 2006) Bulger accused Dubner and Levitt of
"holding Stetson Kennedy responsible for the inadequacies of their own
research":
It's preposterous. I have worked with Stetson Kennedy for more than
30 years, conducting almost 100 in-depth interviews with both Kennedy
and his contemporaries. Your writers use one footnote from my
dissertation as "evidence," yet Dubner admitted to me that they never
read the whole thing. This is "data"? What is the smoking gun here?[25]
In the same issue of the magazine a letter of protest from famed oral historian
Studs Terkel
affirms that "With half a dozen Stetson Kennedys, we can transform our
society into one of truth, grace and beauty.... The thing is, Stetson
did what he set out to do .... He did get help. He should have been much
more up-front. But he certainly doesn't deserve this treatment".
In his own response (published in the Jacksonville, Florida
Folio Weekly, January 27, 2006) Kennedy pulled no punches:
The hidden story behind these hidden story guys is that is was a put-up, hatchet job. Freakonomics
co-author, Stephen Dubner, admitted to me that it was Ben Green, author
of the book about the Harry T. Moore assassinations, who made the call.
And, why would he have it in for me? We once had a contract to
collaborate on the Moore book and split the byline; but instead we
split, because I was convinced that lawmen at every level were involved
in every phase of the murders, while he was bent not just upon whitewash
but on praising the G-men for a "stellar performance".
I must say that I am not at all comfortable about being in Freakonomics,
anyway. I took the authors into my home on the basis of their assertion
that what they were after was the economics of the Klan. The next thing
I knew, they sent me a pre-publication copy of their sketch of Klan
history, and I was horrified to see that it was a rehash of the Klan's
very own "Birth of A Nation" version. I did some detailed editing, but
they chose to ignore it — just as they did all the documentation I gave
them on my infiltration of Klans all over the South, all by my lonesome.
I trust that readers took note of the book's attack upon Head Start,
which with all its faults, is a godsend to many. Still worse is the
book's suggestion that the way to decrease the crime rate is to decrease
the black birthrate via abortion. Without reference to what American
does to its black and tan kids, that is sheer racism. There is too much
evil going on in the world for me, going on 90, to take time out to
haggle with anyone about which agent covered which Klan meeting 50 years
ago.[26]
In 2006,
The Florida Times-Union, after extensive research, published an article
"KKK Book Stands Up to Claim of Falsehood"
(January 29, 2006) substantiating the general accuracy of Kennedy's
account of infiltrating the Klan, while acknowledging that (as he
himself never denied) he had made use of dramatic effects and multiple
narratives in the book
I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan.
David Pilgrim of the
Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University commented:
Green claimed, after months of readings Kennedy's field notes, that he was unable to substantiate many of the claims in The Klan Unmasked.
He even insinuated that Kennedy had fabricated his true role. Kennedy,
in his 90s, fought to salvage his reputation and protect his legacy. He
acknowledges that some accounts in his books were actually derived from
the actions of co-infiltrators or others sympathetic with undermining
the Klan. Though I recognize the importance of integrity in a person's
work, I am nevertheless not especially troubled if Southern Exposure or The Klan Unmasked
includes accounts from others afraid to speak for themselves. Nor am I
bothered that Kennedy embellished his role. Infiltrating the Klan was an
act of great courage, and the information in the books and on the radio
shows led to the arrests of some Klansmen, the derailing of domestic
terrorist acts, and the unpopularity of the Klan organization. That is
good enough for me. I encourage readers to watch this short video [(no longer) on Youtube] which chronicles the life and work of Kennedy.
The Jim Crow Museum staff periodically trains docents to work in the
facility. When I facilitate this training I have the students read
Kennedy's book, Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was (1959). The book
is a mock guide dripping with bitter sarcasm; nevertheless, it is a
historically sound account of life under Jim Crow segregation.
Death and Memorials
Stetson Kennedy's ashes are spread at the end of his memorial service on
October 1, 2011 onto Beluthahatchee Lake by his daughter, Jill Bowen.
Kennedy died on August 27, 2011 at Baptist Medical Center South in
Jacksonville, Florida, where he had been in palliative care for several
days.
[27]
Kennedy's stated wishes were that upon his death there be a party
held rather than a funeral; therefore, a celebration of Kennedy's life
was held on October 1, 2011 (four days before Kennedy's 95th birthday)
at Kennedy's homestead, Beluthahatchee Park.
[28]
Several hundred kin, friends, and admirers gathered for the events
which commenced with an hour of music performed by many well-known
artists of pieces among which were several written by Kennedy’s friend
Woody Guthrie,
who composed many songs at Beluthahatchee, including a number about
Kennedy, e.g., "Beluthahatchee Bill". The music culminated with all
present singing Guthrie’s "
This Land Is Your Land",
which was followed by an hour of eulogies. Then all present walked down
to Lake Beluthahatchee and watched as Kennedy’s ashes were scattered
thereon from a canoe by his daughter.
[29]
Books
- Mister Homer, 1939
- Southern Exposure, University of Alabama Press 2011 reprint, ISBN 978-0-8173-5672-9
- The Klan Unmasked, University of Alabama Press 2011 reprint: ISBN 978-0-8173-5674-3
- Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A., University of Alabama Press 2011 reprint: ISBN 978-0-8173-5671-2
- Palmetto Country, 1942, University Press of Florida 1989 reprint: ISBN 0-8130-0959-6, Florida Historical Society Press 2009 reprint with a new publisher's preface, updated Afterward and eighty photographs ISBN 1-886104-38-7 ; ISBN 978-1-886104-38-9
- The Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was Before the Overcoming, 1956 at Paris, 1959, Florida Atlantic University 1990 reprint: ISBN 0-8130-0987-1
- South Florida Folklife, 1994, (coauthors Peggy A. Bulger and Tina Bucuvalas), University Press of Mississippi, ISBN 0-87805-659-9
- After Appomattox: How the South Won the War, 1995, University Press of Florida 1996 reprint: ISBN 0-8130-1388-7
- Grits and Grunts: Folkloric Key West, Pineapple Press, 2008
- The Florida Slave, The Florida Historical Society Press, September 29, 2011, ISBN 978-1-886104-48-8
To see more of who died in 2011
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