William Stetson Kennedy (October 5, 1916 – August 27, 2011) was an American author, folklorist and human rights activist. 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. Kennedy wrote or co-wrote ten books.

Childhood and education

William Stetson Kennedy, commonly known as Stetson Kennedy, was born on October 5, 1916, in the Springfield neighborhood of Jacksonville, Florida to Willye Stetson and George Wallace Kennedy. A descendant of signers of the Declaration of Independence, Kennedy came from a wealthy, aristocratic Southern family with relatives including John Batterson Stetson, founder of the Stetson hat empire and namesake of Stetson University, and an uncle "Brady" who served as the head Klan official, or "Great Titan", of a congressional district.

At a young age, Kennedy began collecting Florida folklore material and wrote poetry about Florida nature. Kennedy had a large role in editing several volumes for the Federal Writers' Project, including The WPA Guide to Florida and A Guide to Key West of the WPA's famed American Guide Series, and The Florida Negro. Kennedy coined the term "Frown Power", when he started a campaign with that name in the 1940s, which simply encouraged people to pointedly frown when they heard bigoted speech.

Kennedy relied on unused material collected during his time with the Federal Writers' Project for his first book, Palmetto Country (1942).

In 1942, Kennedy was an editorial director for the CIO's political action committee. He wrote a series of monographs objecting to racist policies like poll taxes and white primaries because they were designed to disenfranchise minorities and poor people. Because his bad back disqualified him for service in World War II, he decided to channel his patriotism towards combating racial injustices in the Jim Crow South. The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith helped Kennedy establish a cover identity as John Perkins. From 1942 to 1946, he lived a double life as an employee of the CIO and as a white supremacist who joined up to 20 hate groups with names like White Front, Confederate Underground, and American Gentile Army. Using Talmadge as a reference, Kennedy secured a sales job with the racist magazine The Southern Outlook and managed to join the Nathan Bedford Forrest Klavern #1 of the KKK. Georgia filed a quo warranto suit against the Klan, and the Klan surrendered its charter on June 13, 1947.

Exposure of the KKK

Kennedy was inspired by the success of Under Cover, John Roy Carlson's exposé of American Nazis. In 1944, he was pitching a similar book organized around Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, but it took another two years of revisions to convince Doubleday to publish Southern Exposure. The book was a bestseller and a critical favorite. The Institute for Southern Studies went so far as to name their journal after Kennedy's book. The book outraged the Klan and a bounty was put on Kennedy's head. Pearson dubbed Kennedy "the nation's number-one Klanbuster". Kennedy claims he pitched the Klan as a subject. In The New Republic, Thomas Whiteside described Superman's regular use of KKK passwords as a constant irritant to Grand Dragon Samuel Green, who was forced to listen to the show and update compromised codes. A myth took hold that the actual audio disproves. Superman never uses any code words as he takes on "the Clan".

In Southern Exposure, Kennedy slips into the first person to relate his trip to Stone Mountain to document a Klan rally.

Kennedy defended his work in several essays and interviews. Several of his colleagues and other historians supported Kennedy's method.

Later career

Kennedy traveled to Geneva in 1950 and then to Paris. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an introduction to the French translation of Kennedy's Jim Crow book. Kennedy traveled extensively behind the Iron Curtain after he took the subway into East Berlin. He met Maria Tănase in Romania, visited the USSR, and Hungary. His passport expired while he was in Eastern Europe, and he was officially in police custody in Paris until he was issued a new one and was able to return to America. Kennedy is also featured as one of the "Whistle Blowers", in Studs Terkel's book Coming of Age, published in 1995.

In 2007 St. Johns County declared a "Stetson Kennedy Day".

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. 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.

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.

Personal life

According to friends, he was married seven times, though Kennedy only admitted to five marriages, stating, "I'll leave it to the historians to decide how many times I've been married." His first marriage was in 1936 to Edith Ogden-Aguilar, a Cuban émigré he met in Key West, Florida while doing fieldwork for his own writing shortly after leaving UF.

After fleeing Budapest with his Hungarian wife during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Kennedy was held in detention in Paris for over a year after his passport was confiscated by the U.S. government due to McCarthyism.

In 2006, at 90 years old, Kennedy married writer and bookstore owner Sandra Parks, a former city commissioner of St. Augustine, Florida. They remained married until Kennedy died in 2011.

In 2005 Kennedy received a life estate on his 4-acre homestead in Saint Johns County, and it is now Beluthahatchee Park.

The name "Beluthahatchee" describes a mythical "Florida Shangri-la, where all unpleasantness is forgiven and forgotten" according to Zora Neale Hurston.

Among the amenities are a picnic pavilion, canoe dock, access to the Beluthahatchee 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 has, upon his death, been opened as a museum and archive and offer educational exhibits, primarily about Woody Guthrie and William Bartram in addition to Kennedy himself, and has been operated by the Kennedy Foundation which shares 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.

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.

Kennedy's stated wishes were that upon his death a party should be 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. Several hundred relatives, friends, and admirers gathered for the events which commenced with an hour of musical performances. The performances included several pieces written by Kennedy's friend Woody Guthrie, who composed many songs at Beluthahatchee, including several about Kennedy, e.g., "Beluthahatchee Bill", culminating with all present singing Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land". This was followed by an hour of eulogies. Then all present walked down to Lake Beluthahatchee and viewed Kennedy's ashes being scattered thereon from a canoe.

Books

  • Mister Homer, 1939
  • Southern Exposure. New York: Doubleday, 1946.

:* Reissued by University of Alabama Press 2011.

  • I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan. London: Arco Publishers, 1954.

:*Abridged as Passage to Violence. NY: Lion Books, 1954.

:*Reissued as The Klan Unmasked. University of Alabama Press 2011.

  • Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A.. Laurence and Wishart, 1949.

:*Reissued by University of Alabama Press 2011.

  • Palmetto Country, 1942, University Press of Florida 1989 reprint: , Florida Historical Society Press 2009 reprint with a new publisher's preface, updated Afterward and eighty photographs ;
  • The Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was Before the Overcoming, 1956 at Paris, 1959, Florida Atlantic University 1990 reprint:
  • South Florida Folklife, 1994, (coauthors Peggy A. Bulger and Tina Bucuvalas), University Press of Mississippi,
  • After Appomattox: How the South Won the War, 1995, University Press of Florida 1996 reprint:
  • Grits and Grunts: Folkloric Key West, Pineapple Press, 2008
  • The Florida Slave, The Florida Historical Society Press, September 29, 2011,

References

  • Stetson Kennedy Papers at Georgia State University
  • Stetson Kennedy collection at the New York Public Library
  • Interview with Stetson Kennedy, September 22, 1981, Florida Folklife Collection, State Library & Archives of Florida
  • Oral History Interview with Stetson Kennedy, May 11, 1990, Oral Histories of the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Stetson Kennedy Letters, Bienes Museum of the Modern Book, Broward County Library.
  • "Clan of the Fiery Cross", Parts 1–16, The Adventures of Superman, recordings of the Superman radio program from Archive.org
  • "Know Your Enemy", This American Life, transcript of episode about Stetson Kennedy
  • Kennedy's Correspondences and other papers are housed at The University Of Iowa Archives