Person of the Year: Stetson Kennedy
The 93-year old former Klan-buster counts 2009 as one of his
busiest years yet.
By Anne Schindler
16 FOLIO WEEKLY December 29, 2009-January 4, 2010
What keeps a 93-year-old going? Not entertainment
or drink, in the case of Stetson Kennedy. He’s
never been much for the latter, and he sees little of
lasting value in most pop culture. Medical issues plague
him as they do any elderly man; doctors just removed a
third melanoma from his scalp. And he’s well outlived his
peer group — along with friends and allies decades
younger than he.
Nostalgia might be enough to sustain him, if all
Kennedy wants to do is receive visitors while tucked under
a cozy afghan. But what makes a 93-year-old get up, make
a hand-lettered posterboard sign and stand on a street
corner picketing a grocery store? Or head to a library in
Harlem to pore over records from the Civil Rights movement?
Or attend a public hearing on the future of water
use in Northeast Florida?
Stetson Kennedy has led a remarkable life by any measure
— he infiltrated the Klan, collected Florida folklore
alongside Zora Neale Hurston, hung out with Jean-Paul
Sartre in Paris, published seven books — but the sheer
longevity of his activism threatens to overshadow all else. In
2009 alone, Kennedy attended the opening of the Stetson
Kennedy Library in Gainesville, hosted his 93rd birthday
party at his home called Beluthahatchee, picketed Publix,
filed suit against the St. Johns River Water Management
District, celebrated Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday in New York
City and traveled to Washington, D.C. for Pres. Obama’s
inaugural ceremony. And this wasn’t an unusually active
year. Since 2006, he’s remarried, made public appearances
in New Orleans, Miami and New York, received a dozen
honors and formal recognitions, worked on his autobiography
and negotiated with Hollywood over a feature film
on his life.
Someone looking at Kennedy from a distance might
expect that such drive is rooted in optimism — faith in the
future, a fundamental belief in the goodness of humankind.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Kennedy, though far from dour, is a profoundly
cynical person. Having seen the
worst of humanity — the fascism of the
1930s, the racism of the ’50s — he harbors
no illusions about the hearts of men. And
though he has witnessed some remarkable
progress in his time, his view of the future
isn’t exactly rosy.
“The doomsayers don’t know the half of
it,” he says.
Yet Kennedy, for all his harsh pronouncements,
remains a lighthearted, even
jolly presence. He’s quick with one-liners
and roguish recollections, all delivered with
an eye twinkle or self-deprecating laugh.
And he remains a magnetic personality.
Carol Alexander, executive director of The
Ritz Theatre and LaVilla Museum, says her
“spiritual mother” Mavynee “The Beach
Lady” Betsch was always in love with Stetson.
“And I am, too,” she admits. “I don’t
know what it is about him, but he’s always
had that savoir faire.”
“Even at 92, 93,” she says, “the brother
still has it.”
Stetson Kennedy was born Oct. 5,
1916 to what he calls “a typically
Southern” family in southwest Jacksonville.
He describes himself as a true
nature boy when he was a young man, preferring
the company of animals and the
canopy of trees to humans and their artificial
constructs. “I’ve hated walls all my life,”
he says. “It’s unnatural for any living thing
to live in walls or cages. I always preferred
to be out in the open sky.”
While attending Lee High School in
Jacksonville, he planned to become a zoologist,
or possibly a forest ranger on horseback.
Instead, he graduated into the Great
Depression and began working collections
for his father’s retail furniture business. It
was his first exposure to the dark side of
capitalism. More than once, he says, a customer
told him that keeping current on her
account would mean sending her children
to bed hungry. “That was my introduction
to life,” he says.
The harsh realities and inequalities that
he encountered riding the city’s backroads
changed the direction of his life. “I decided
to be a zoologist for our own species,” he
says, “to look at the human animal — the
most screwed-up and dangerous animal,
the only real wild animal on the planet.”
Kennedy attended the University of
Florida but left in 1937 to begin collecting
folklore and oral histories for the Florida
Writers’ Project, one of many initiatives of
FDR’s Works Progress Administration. In
that capacity, he worked under famed folklorist
Alan Lomax and made friends and
contacts that would define much of his
adult life: Woody Guthrie, Richard Wright,
Leadbelly, Pete Seeger. Kennedy later
worked as a reporter, joined several progressive
political groups, and protested racist
policies like poll taxes and Jim Crow laws.
He also famously infiltrated the Ku Klux
Klan, then worked to reveal the group’s
secret rituals — including to the producers
of the popular “Superman” radio program,
who incorporated them into a series in
which the superhero battled the Klan.
Kennedy has been credited with helping
to trivialize the once formidable Klan,
though his efforts and his book about infiltrating
it, “The Klan Unmasked,” have also
been a source of controversy. In 1999, Ben
Green, a freelance historian with whom
Kennedy had collaborated, accused him of
aggrandizing his efforts and downplaying
the fact much of the dicier information in
his book came from another Klan infiltrator.
That accusation surfaced again in 2005,
when “Freakonomics” authors Stephen J.
Dubner and economist Steven D. Leavitt
said in a piece in The New York Times
Magazine they’d been “hoodwinked” into
lionizing Kennedy in their bestselling book.
For his part, Kennedy has said he wished
he’d done a better job balancing truth and
fiction in his accounts of the Klan, but
maintains the important thing was getting
the story out. “I wanted to show what was
happening at the time,” he told The Florida
Times-Union in 2006. “Who gives a damn
how it’s written? It is the one and only document
of the working Klan. ... The book is
a document of our times.”
Carol Alexander says it’s the only time
she can recall anyone disparaging the man,
which she suggests is a pretty good record
when one considers he’s been at the center
of controversy for better than 70 years.
“What is most remarkable to me,”
Alexander says, “is his idealism. There are
not a lot of people that could stay out there
as he has all these years. As people get older,
they burn out and soften up. But Stetson is
a warrior. He’s a front-liner. And true
warriors never soften up.”
Activism has a definite life cycle. For
some, it’s born of youthful passions
or campus activism. For others, it’s
driven by midlife political interests or
parental concerns. And, for a few, it’s kindled
by the free time and perspective that
retirement affords. But most activists eventually
wear down. Some are burned out by
defeat, others stop when they’ve won an
important battle. But win or lose, most
eventually weary.
Kennedy, by comparison, has remained
vigorously, even defiantly active. His politics
are absolutely current — and surprisingly
radical. He decries American policies
abroad, of “trying to shock-and-awe people
in countries on other side of the world,”
adding, “Hitler had better reasons when he
started his thing — at least he was trying to
‘reunite Germans’ or something nice.” He
ridicules the federal response to the global
economic meltdown, saying “the only
emergency measure we’ve taken is saving
the trillionaire financial houses — making
good their losses and providing them with
more to steal without any guards on duty.”
And he blames everything from inane pop
music to anemic news programming for
contributing to “a state-of-the-art manipulation
of the American mind.”
For Kennedy, such concerns are nothing
new. Despite his many years of activism
and advocacy, he’s never had much faith
in people.
“It’s been a constant threat throughout
my 93 years — of disillusionment. I don’t
want to say despair because I haven’t quite
given up on the human race, or the American
people specifically, but it is very painful to be
disillusioned, when you’ve spent your life
pinning all your hope on people, to have
them do such naughty things.”
His skepticism occasionally dips into sarcasm.
Recalling a speech where an audience
member offered the preservation of a stretch
of beachfront as proof of environmental
success, Kennedy replied, “Great. Now all
we’ve got to do is save the rest of the world.”
It seems possible that Kennedy’s innate
cynicism has in some ways insulated him
from burnout. To the extent that it provides
distance, might it not serve as an emotional
cushion when efforts fail? Kennedy himself
doesn’t ascribe to this theory. Instead, he
suggests that his motive isn’t the payoff —
the victory — but the struggle itself. Unlike
most activists, who are motivated by
accomplishing a particular goal, Kennedy
envisions activism as a perpetual fight.
“Struggle is all, it’s what keeps us going,”
he says. “Win or lose, struggle is the way to
go out.”
Of course, Kennedy is quick to note
that his late-in-life activism would never
have been possible without his late-in-life
wife, Sandra Parks. The pair met in April
2003, when she went to his Fruit Cove
home, Beluthahatchee, to ask him to join
in a St. Augustine Civil Rights commemoration.
Parks, herself a lifelong activist and
former St. Augustine City Commissioner,
recalls he was “walking on all fours — using
furniture to get around,” and says he was
“largely forgotten” by the world.
Inspired by his history, and the acuity of
his thinking, Parks slowly drew him out.
“I made myself his publicist,” she says.
Three years later, he made her his (sixth or
seventh; Kennedy is himself unsure) wife.
Parks has devoted the past seven years to
ensuring that Kennedy is honored for his
lifetime of activism, and a credenza in the
couple’s St. Augustine living room speaks to
her accomplishment. Plaques, awards and
engraved statues abound. Most, Parks
notes, were received in the past six years.
The recognition, Parks says, has definitely
contributed to his longevity. She quotes
something she told The Florida Times-
Union at Kennedy’s 93rd birthday party earlier
this year. “I told them, ‘As long as he’s
got a book in line and is adored, he’s not
going anywhere’ — and it’s true. The recognition
makes all the difference.” (Kennedy
concurs. “Being Person of the Year will keep
me going indefinitely,” he says with a laugh.)
Kennedy also credits Dwight Hines, a
St. Augustine rabblerouser with an environmental
focus, with “bringing me back to
the front lines.” Hines — part caretaker,
part disciple — is one of a younger generation
of radicals who’ve found inspiration in
Kennedy. David Thundershield Queen, the
environmentalist and political firebrand
who died of cancer this year, considered
Kennedy a hero. So does Ed Slavin, whose
blog cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com
is ground zero for lefty activism in the
Ancient City. Slavin says it’s no accident
that the elderly Kennedy is embraced by
those at the far end of the political spectrum.
“He was a radical,” he says. “Civil
Rights were radical in the 1930s — and he
was one of a few people speaking out.”
The cause of equal rights is widely
accepted now, Slavin notes, which may
obscure the extreme nature of Kennedy’s
political origins. But it doesn’t mask them
from like-minded activists. “He’s a great
inspiration,” he says.
On most days, Kennedy is up at 5 a.m.
He begins by making a To Do list,
usually about 17 items long. Depending
on priorities, he works on his autobiography,
updates his correspondence, prepares
speeches and makes contacts about upcoming
public appearances. He typically gets
through about 12 or more items, leaves the
remainder to top tomorrow’s list and
“go[es] to bed happy.” He rarely naps.
One of his current preoccupations is the
feature film on his life, which has been
optioned since the mid-’70s, but been
passed among producers and never gotten
off the ground. He’s confident
that there’s progress on that
front, as well as a more documentary-
style production, but
adds wryly, “They’d better
hurry if they want me alive.”
Kennedy obviously won’t
live forever, and his legacy is
his central focus. It’s the reason
he donated his home
Beluthahatchee, intact, as a
center for environmental
preservation and learning, the
reason he donated his library
to Gainesville’s Civic Media
Center, and the reason he still
speaks and travels so widely.
But he also continues to work
on the same causes that have
always driven him, and does
so with the same dramatic
flair. He plans to release — at
midnight on New Year’s Eve,
no less — every last bit of
inside information he collected
on the Klan, his final push to destabilize
what he calls that “most evil” organization.
It’s not clear that the gesture will have
any great impact, but like many things
Kennedy does these days, it also serves to
underscore a lifetime of accomplishments.
Acouple days after our interview,
Kennedy touches base. He worries
his comments may have made him
seem “overly pessimistic.” I assure him
they did not. He may be a cynic, but there
could hardly be a stronger advocate for a
lifetime of activism or the motivating
power of a good cause. Despite his unforgiving
view of reality, his longing for
change is infectious.
“No matter what,” he says. “I don’t regret
doing what I did. I wish I’d done more.”
Stetson Kennedy …
… on the economy: “If you want an opinion, it is
that what little evidence there is of an upturn or having
hit bottom is, in my opinion, superficial. [Citing a
laundry list of global economic frailties, adds:] It’s
really a question of which of these realities in the
economy will have the honor of doing us in.”
… on foreign policy: “It looks like we will continue
making war — and we don’t have a dime.”
… on the social impacts of economic crisis:
“It will lead to more cannibalism.”
… on America’s emergency response: “We
proved to the world, if not to ourselves, that we are
incapable of handling a thing like Hurricane Katrina
or 9/11 or a tsunami if we ever got one.”
… on 9/11: “We freaked out as a nation, and we
never did recover.We just stayed freaked out.”
… on race relations: “There’s been appreciable
progress — but in many ways there is backsliding.”
… on being selected Folio Weekly’s Person of
the Year: “I’ll have to think of something I’ve done
this year that’s worthy of that honor.”
St. Petersburg Times
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