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One of Stetson Kennedy’s earliest memories holds a vivid clue about the man he is today and the life he lived to get here.

It happened near his childhood home in Jacksonville. Kennedy and some friends were walking with his family’s black maid, Ella. As they prepared to cross a busy street, Ella warned the children to wait until she told them it was OK to go. Kennedy obeyed. The others didn’t and were nearly hit by a car.

When they got to the other side of the street, one child turned and called, “We don’t have to do what you say. You’re nothin’ but a nigger.”

“That made Ella cry,” Kennedy says, “and I think it made me cry, too.”The incident left an indelible mark on the young boy, one he would spend

the next eight decades working to reconcile.During that time, Kennedy did things most people can only imagine:

became a writer, rubbed elbows with the wealthy and well-known, addressed the United Nations, lived in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and enjoyed the admiration of governors to best-selling authors. He even had a day named in his honor and squeezed in a few semesters at the University of Florida, where arguably he was one of the country’s first student political activists.

Then there’s the thing for which he’s perhaps most often credited: infiltrat-ing the Ku Klux Klan, exposing its secrets and helping speed the demise of one of America’s most feared and reviled organizations.

As daring as that seems, Kennedy says it was only one of many missions he tackled in his quest to right as many societal ills as possible.

“If something seemed to be wrong,” he says, “I tried to cross swords with it, always on the assumption that the pen is mightier than the sword.”

By Steve Orlando (BA ’86)

Unmasking Stetson Kennedy may be retired, but his role in exposing the inner workings of the KKK is legendary.

the Klan

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Photography by Lans Stout

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With the Klan dogging his trail and a bounty on his head, Kennedy traveled to Geneva in 1952 to testify before a United Nations commission about forced labor in the United States. He chose to stay in Europe for several years before returning to Florida.

His next literary shot across the bow of the Old South was “The Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was Before the Overcoming,” published in 1956. The book was written as a satirical guidebook that chronicled local, state and federal laws and court cases that created and perpetuated racial segregation.

In Europe Kennedy also found a publisher for another book, “I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan,” later renamed “The Klan Unmasked,” his account of his time with the KKK that later was translated in 20 languages.

In his absence, the Klan, which he says tried at least twice to burn down his house, finally reduced it to ashes.

Kennedy is reluctant to discuss what he saw during his time with the Klan, but, he says, to this day, “I still have the occasional dream” about the things he witnessed.

FreakonomicsTrue to Kennedy’s reputation, his descriptions of his

Klan infiltration became entangled in controversy a half century after he says it occurred. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, co-authors of the 2005 book “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything,” included a chapter on Kennedy’s Klan infiltration.

In January 2006, an article by the two detailing what they say were discrepancies in Kennedy’s accounts of his Klan activities appeared in The New York Times Magazine. In it, they wrote that many of the things for which Kennedy took credit were actually the work of another man.

While the episode planted seeds of doubt among some, it also brought out Kennedy supporters, among them noted author and oral historian Studs Terkel and Library of Con-gress folklorist Peggy Bulger. Both wrote letters to The New York Times in Kennedy’s defense.

David Chalmers, a retired UF professor and an in-ternationally recognized authority on KKK history, says he doesn’t think the accuracy issue is as critical as what Kennedy’s overall work accomplished.

“It did play an important role in eroding the Klan …, and it did lead the state of Georgia to move against the Klan and rescind its charter,” Chalmers says.

As for Kennedy, he seems unfazed.He acknowledges that some material in “The Klan Un-

masked” was spiced up and there was indeed another man involved, but it was a man who wished to protect himself by remaining anonymous.

“A thing like ‘Freakonomics’ isn’t a drop in the bucket,” he says. “I know what I did and what a lot of other people did. Had it not been for what we did in the ’30s, ’40s and

After a year and a half at UF, Kennedy decided the only way to learn what he really wanted to know was to strike out on his own.

“I invented independent study by dropping out,” he says. “I felt like the world was about to blow up.”

After a two-year hiatus in Key West and a brief return to Gainesville to audit more classes, Kennedy found his call-ing. He joined the newly created Works Progress Adminis-tration writer’s project as a “junior interviewer” for $37.50 to write essays for the Florida Tour Guide.

Higher-ups soon noticed his talent and put him in charge of documenting Florida folklore, oral history and ethnic studies. Kennedy’s world expanded yet again, and he soon found himself teamed up with a black woman whose writing talent would only years later be fully recognized: Zora Neal Hurston.

Jim Crow laws forced the two to travel separately as they crisscrossed the Southeast documenting the lives of black turpentine camp workers, some of them Civil War-era slaves. Hurston, by then in her mid-40s, would travel ahead acting as an advance scout seeking out people to interview. Kennedy, in his early 20s, followed with rudimentary recording equipment to capture the interviews.

Hotels that allowed blacks were rare. “Zora had to sleep in the car very often,” he says.

The years he spent as a WPA writer eventually led Ken-nedy in 1942 to publish his first book, “Palmetto Country.” It is regarded today as a milestone in Florida folklore.

It was also about that time that Kennedy decided to take on the KKK.

The grandson of a Confederate army officer, Kennedy had an uncle who was a Klan member, which he said gave him a way to gain trust and membership. From 1943 to 1948, Kennedy said he ran with the Klan as well as several of the front organizations it used during World War II.

What the Klan didn’t know was that Kennedy was feeding its secrets to the outside world, namely the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Anti-Defamation League and Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson.

In perhaps the most famous example, Kennedy says he slipped Klan code words and secret language to scriptwrit-ers at the “Superman” radio program. The information prompted the writers to dedicate several episodes to the Man of Steel battling the KKK.

The marriage of Kennedy’s crusade for racial equal-ity and his writing skill happened in 1946 with his book “Southern Exposure.” The book documented how the South was struggling with its racially divided history as it entered the new world that emerged after World War II.

One reviewer with the Boston Chronicle wrote, “As Uncle Tom’s Cabin became one of the greatest single forces in the eventual overthrow of slavery, so can “Southern Exposure” play a major role in freeing the country of segregation.”

’50s, the civil rights movement of the ’60s would have been far bloodier.”

Happy hunting groundWalking toward the front door of Kennedy’s modest

32-year-old house in the hamlet of Fruit Cove just south of Jacksonville, it’s hard to imagine a world where aw-ful things happen. A lizard on a small fence preens to an orchestra of cicadas. Live oaks and hickories sprinkle shade across the azaleas, palms and ivy.

This is Beluthahatchee. Kennedy named it, and de- pending on which translation you go with, it’s either a Miccosukee Indian word meaning “dark water” or an Afro-Seminole word that means “happy hunting ground.”

One person who came to love Beluthahatchee almost a much as Kennedy did was Woody Guthrie. The folk balladeer, perhaps best known for writing “This Land is Your Land,” visited Kennedy countless times over the years before his death in 1967, and his presence is still evident.

On the interior wall next to the front door of the house is a framed letter from Guthrie to Kennedy dated March 13, 1952. The rambling missive ends:

“Keep on traveling where your own free conscience takes you (as you’ve always been doing anyhow) and there is no earthly end to the great kinds of good and benefits you can perform.”

It’s at Beluthahatchee that Kennedy has chosen to race time. He turned 90 in October, and he’s working as hard and as fast as he can to cement his legacy.

Kennedy’s son, Loren, is a member of the board of direc-tors for the nonprofit Stetson Kennedy Foundation, which is being established to help further the causes of human rights, social justice, environmental stewardship and the preservation and growth of folk culture.

“The things he did were trailblazing. I understand and respect everything he did,” Loren Kennedy says. “He’s my hero.”

Many others feel the same way. He’s received a plethora of honors in recent years from groups such as the Society of Professional Journalists, the Friends of Libraries USA, the Florida Artists Hall of Fame and St. John’s County, whose commisioners declared Oct. 4, 2005, “Stetson Kennedy Day.”

And yet of all the things he accomplished, Kennedy says nothing stands out as the one he’d like most to be remembered for.

“I didn’t care about being remembered,” he says. “I didn’t do it with that in mind.”

But one thing does give him satisfaction.“Every time I see the change in black and white rela-

tions, that makes me feel good,” he says. “It’s good to see black kids walking around and not being scared every time they see a white.” u

A sleepy campusWilliam Stetson Kennedy was born in 1916. His father,

George, was a furniture merchant; his mother, Willye Stet-son, stayed home, but Kennedy remembers her preparing food and clothing packages and delivering them to the poor.

In the midst of the Depression, Kennedy left home to attend UF, where he joined the Sigma Chi fraternity and moved into the chapter house. Though he doesn’t recall much of it, he said his transcript shows he took a writing class taught by author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings of “Cross Creek” fame (“She had piercing eyes,” he recalls.). He also wrote for the Florida Review, a student literary quarterly.

UF was small and sleepy then, something Kennedy found odd given all that was going on at the time, particu-larly racial inequality and the growing global tide of fascism.

“The campus was quite dead as far as what was going on in the world,” he said.

Kennedy said he felt it was time to get busy. Even as he served his mandatory time in the campus ROTC, he helped establish a campus chapter of the North American Commit-tee to Aid Spanish Democracy. In Jacksonville, he protested shipments of scrap metal to Japan. With students from nearby historically black Bethune-Cookman and Edward Waters colleges, he helped create an interracial chapter of the Florida Intercollegiate Peace Council.

In conservative 1930s Florida, activities like those didn’t win him many friends.

“I know what I did

and what a lot of

other people did.

Had it not been for

what we did in the

’30s, ’40s and ’50s,

the civil rights

movement of the

’60s would have

been far bloodier.”

— Stetson Kennedy