Stetson Kennedy

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Stetson Kennedy

Born October 5, 1916
Jacksonville, Florida
Died 2005
Occupation Award-winning Author
Activist
Folklorist
Nationality American

Stetson Kennedy (born October 5, 1916 in Jacksonville, Florida) is an award-winning author and human rights activist from Florida. Kennedy is also known as a pioneering folklorist, a labor activist, and environmentalist. He is the author of the books After Appomattox, Palmetto Country, Southern Exposure, The Jim Crow Guide, and The Klan Unmasked. He is co-author, with Peggy A. Bulger and Tina Bucuvalas, of South Florida Folklife.

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[edit] Biography and activities

Kennedy was one of the pioneer folklore collectors during the first half of the twentieth century. As a teenager, he began collecting white and African American folklore material while he was collecting "a dollar down and dollar a week" accounts for his father, a furniture merchant. He left the University of Florida, in 1937, to join the WPA Florida Writers' Project, and at the age of 21, was put in charge of folklore, oral history, and ethnic studies.

Kennedy's first book, Palmetto Country, appeared 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, "(It)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."

After World War II Kennedy infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups, and he subsequently authored a number of books dealing with human rights, including Southern Exposure, Jim Crow Guide, and After Appomattox: How the South Won the War, some of which have been widely translated into other languages. While undercover in the Klan, he also provided information - including secret codewords and details of Klan rituals - to the writers of the Superman radio program. The result was a series of four 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. In 1954, Kennedy wrote a popular memoir that exposed the workings of the Klan and his undercover work (I Rode With The Ku Klux Klan). This book has been reissued as "The Klan Unmasked".

A founding member and past president of the Florida Folklore Society, Kennedy is a recipient of the 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.

In 2005, Jacksonville residents attended a banquet in honor of Kennedy's life, and afterwards 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.

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, leading Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner to say that he was "the greatest single contributor to the weakening of the Ku Klux Klan." [1][2]

[edit] Controversy

In 1992, allegations arose that Kennedy falsified or misrepresented portions of I Rode With The Ku Klux Klan. Ben Green, in the course of research on his own book (on Harry T. Moore) on which Kennedy collaborated for a period, examined Kennedy's archives stored in libraries in New York and Atlanta, and concluded that Kennedy's records presented a number of interviews and events that—according to I Rode With The Ku Klux Klan—were conducted undercover and which dealt with considerable racist material, but which were, in fact, done completely aboveboard and openly, in interviews with the personages, and subscriptions by mail to the concerned societies. Furthermore, it has been alleged that much of the most powerful and daring undercover infiltrations were in fact carried out on Kennedy's behalf by a man named "John Brown" (probably a pseudonymic reference to the famous executed Civil War-era activist John Brown). Other portions of the book have also been called into question: Dan Duke (then a state prosecutor) denies that he worked with Kennedy as closely as the book presents (to quote from the New York Times magazine, "'None of that happened', he told Green.") Green is not the only one to support these accusations: Jim Clark (of the University of Central Florida) has been quoted as saying, "[he] built a national reputation on many things that didn't happen."

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt included a favorable summary of his anti-Klan activities with special emphasis on the I Rode… book in their bestselling book Freakonomics. When pressed by them, Kennedy said "…in some cases I took the reports and actions of this other guy and incorporated them into one narrative."

Forbes magazine, after reviewing the matter stated "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."

The charges have been denied by some scholars. His associate and coauthor Peggy Bulger said 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." Bulger responded in a letter to the New York Times Magazine (January 22, 2006) that Dubner and Levitt "are holding Stetson Kennedy responsible for the inadequacies of their own research. . . . What is the smoking gun here?" In the same issue of the magazine, a letter from famed oral historian Studs Terkel states "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.""

The Florida Times-Union, after extensive research, published an account of the situation "KKK Book Stands Up to Claim of Falsehood" (January 29, 2006) that offers verification of Kennedy's infiltration of the Klan but corroborates his use of dramatic device and multiple narratives in the book I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan.

[edit] Popular culture references to Stetson Kennedy

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[edit] Books

  • Mister Homer, 1939
  • Palmetto Country, 1942, University Press of Florida 1989 reprint: ISBN 0-8130-0959-6
  • Southern Exposure (Florida Sand Dollar Book), 1946, University Press of Florida 1991 reprint, ISBN 0-8130-1078-0
  • I Rode With the Klan, 1954, republished as The Klan Unmasked, University Press of Florida 1990 reprint: ISBN 0-8130-0986-3
  • 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

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[edit] External links

Persondata
NAME Kennedy, Stetson
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Author, folkorist, anti-Ku Klux Klan crusader
DATE OF BIRTH October 5, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Jacksonville, Florida
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
Languages