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. His views on race relations in the South were largely influenced by his family's black maid, known only as "Flo", whom Kennedy considered "almost like a mother". He recalled that during his childhood in the 1920s, local Klan members beat and raped Flo for "sassing whitefolks" after she questioned a white bus driver who had given her incorrect change. Recalling this incident later in life, Kennedy said, "At a very tender age, I became aware that grownups were lying about a whole lot more than Santa Claus", in reference to the Klan's claims of being Christian patriots.
Kennedy attended Jacksonville public schools and graduated from Robert E. Lee High School during the Great Depression. In 1935, he enrolled in University of Florida (UF), leaving in 1937 without receiving a degree. He also studied at the New School for Social Research in New York and at the Sorbonne in Paris, France.
Early writing and activism In 1936, while studying at University of Florida, Kennedy collected boots and blankets for the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War.
Kennedy has been called "one of the pioneer folklore collectors during the first half of the 20th century". In 1937, he left the University of Florida to join the Federal Writers' Project, the federally funded Works Progress Administration (WPA) initiative created under the New Deal to fund and support American writers during the Great Depression. As part of the Federal Writers' Project, the Library of Congress hired archivists to document the diversity of American culture by recording regional folksongs (e.g., children's songs, dance and gospel music) and oral histories in many languages and dialects. For five years, Kennedy collected Florida folklore, traveling throughout Florida alongside other notable figures such as Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston and folklorist Alan Lomax, among others. 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.
At this time, Kennedy was contributing to periodicals like PM, the New York Post, The Nation, Common Ground, The Crisis, In Fact, Southern Frontier, and Southern Patriot. He also began writing "Inside Out" a column for the Federated Press that ran from 1937 to 1950. 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). It was commissioned by Georgia writer Erskine Caldwell for the American Folkways Series. When it was published, Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress said, "I very much doubt that a better book about Florida folklife will ever be written".
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. Kennedy saw Southern fascist policies as part of an alliance with Northern industrialists to perpetuate a slavocracy, and this thesis was the basis of his second book, Southern Exposure.
Infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan While working for the Writers Project, Kennedy often heard stories about the KKK's terrorism.Wade, Wyn Craig. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Clan in America. Simon and Schuster, 1987. 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.Bulger, Margaret Anne. Stetson Kennedy: Applied folklore and cultural advocacy. Dissertation. University of Pennsylvania, 1992. 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.
Kennedy moved from Miami to Atlanta to target the highest rungs of the KKK. He volunteered for former Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge, who had been voted out of office in 1942. Though not a member, Talmadge supported the KKK and often spoke at their events.Kennedy, Stetson. The Klan Unmasked. University of Alabama Press, 2011. 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.
With the help of other informants, Kennedy filed detailed reports on the Klavern's Monday night meetings from September 1944 until November 1948. He also reported the Klan's various crimes to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, as well as police, prosecutors, journalists, and human rights organizations.
A folklorist by habit, Kennedy documented how the Klan drew on fraternal organizations like the Elks and the Masons. He also relished the absurd flourishes of Klan lore, such as making "K" the initial letter for most terms, renaming the days of the week "Dark, Deadly, Dismal, Doleful, Desolate, Dreadful, and Desperate", and their Byzantine handbook the Kloran. Kennedy decided to expose such "Klankraft" to public ridicule.
More importantly, Kennedy recognized that the KKK was operating in violation of its non-profit charter. In May 1946, he wrote to Governor Ellis Arnall with justifications for revoking it. By June, Arnall had announced his intention to cancel the charter."Arnall Declares War on Klan", Intermountain Jewish News. June 7, 1946. Georgia filed a quo warranto suit against the Klan, and the Klan surrendered its charter on June 13, 1947."KLAN SURRENDERS CHARTER WITHOUT A FIGHT: ACTION OF KLAN COUNSEL SHOCKS COURT CROWDS GREEN CLAIMS KLAN STATUS IN GEORGIA REMAINS UNCHANGED." Atlanta Daily World. June 14, 1947. 1.
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.
Southern Exposure is a survey of the politics of the South from the Civil War until the present, with a particular focus on labor practices and inequality. The book deals briefly and candidly with the Ku Klux Klan. Kennedy traveled to Chattanooga to interview J. B. Stoner, who did not realize the author was opposed to his work. Kennedy quotes Stoner's unvarnished racism at length. He also includes images of original Klan paperwork like Forms K-111 and K-115, applications for reinstatement and "Citizenship in the Invisible Empire".Kennedy, Stetson. Southern Exposure. Doubleday, 1946. The book outraged the Klan and a bounty was put on Kennedy's head.
Kennedy fed information to law enforcement and journalists in order to engineer counteractions against the Klan. He even showed up at the House Un-American Activities Committee in his Klan robe to get their attention. Having once called the KKK "an old American institution" after allowing Imperial Wizard James A. Colescott to testify, HUAC was uninterested in Kennedy's information. His most high-profile media ally was Drew Pearson who had a nationally syndicated column and a popular radio show. Pearson regularly broadcast intelligence from Kennedy. The Klan was irate to hear its machinations made public, such as Eugene Talmadge's secret promise to appoint the KKK's Atlanta Cyclops to run the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.Chalmers, David J. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan. Duke University Press, 1987. 330. Pearson dubbed Kennedy "the nation's number-one Klanbuster".
Superman On June 10, 1946, the highly popular Adventures of Superman radio show began a 16-episode story called "The Clan of the Fiery Cross". The show had previously tackled hate groups as a subject. The writers approached the Anti-Defamation League about new foes for Superman.Bowers, Rick. Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan: the true story of how the iconic superhero battled the men of hate. National Geographic, 2012. Kennedy claims he pitched the Klan as a subject.
By 1947, the ADL was claiming Kennedy was a consultant on the show."Kennedy Named Consultant for Famed Radio Series", Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith Bulletin, Vol IX, No. 3. March, 1947. 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.Whiteside, Thomas. "Up, Up and Awa-a-y!!" The New Republic. March 3, 1947. 15–16. A myth took hold that the actual audio disproves. Superman never uses any code words as he takes on "the Clan".
The Klan Unmasked In early 1947, Stetson Kennedy's undercover career as John Perkins ended when he was subpoenaed to testify in the trial of Homer Loomis and Emory Burke. Loomis ran an organization called the Columbians of Atlanta, a neo-Nazi terrorist organization that Kennedy infiltrated with other operatives. His fellow Columbians were shocked to see that Perkins was Kennedy, and they attacked him in the courthouse.
Kennedy spent the spring of 1947 on a lecture tour. He moved to Greenwich Village, because the Klan made his native South unsafe for him. In New York, he collaborated with photographer Marian Palfi on Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A. He was also writing a manuscript titled I Rode With the Ku Klux Clan, which was reissued in 1990 as The Klan Unmasked.
Unlike the journalistic Southern Exposure, where Kennedy occasionally appears in first person, The Klan Unmasked is written as a potboiler. Having struggled since 1948 to get it published, Kennedy decided that turning it into a thriller was the best way to sell it. Writing in the style of Mickey Spillane, Kennedy is a hard-boiled witness to everything from the murder of a Black man by the KKK to the "Wool Hat Putsch" by Herman Talmadge.
In Southern Exposure, Kennedy slips into the first person to relate his trip to Stone Mountain to document a Klan rally. He recasts the event in The Klan Unmasked as his formal initiation as a Klansman.