Stetson Kennedy was in front lines for justice
Submitted by Tonyaa Weathersbee on August 31, 2011 - 7:50am
This past week brought the unveiling of a national memorial to Martin Luther King Jr., and the death of a local legend who was working to stamp out racial injustice long before the civil rights icon laid out his dream for crushing it.
Last Saturday, William Stetson Kennedy died peacefully at age 94. Which was a miracle, since he spent most of his life confronting forces that used violence and intimidation.
Kennedy dared to be a man far ahead of his time. That must have taken some doing back in the 1940s.
That was the decade that the U.S. Supreme Court banned discrimination in interstate travel in 1946, and President Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed forces two years later. Those changes kicked off a slow, decades-long march toward desegregation.
The Ku Klux Klan also was there.
Florida and Georgia were strongholds for the hate group during that time, and between 1921 and 1946, 61 black people had been lynched in Florida alone.
In 1946, however, Kennedy wrote the book "Southern Exposure," the first of his many efforts to expose some of the hatred that inspired such killings by infiltrating Klan meetings.
As it turned out Kennedy had to go all the way to France to get his book published in 1954, after rewriting it and retitling it "The Klan Unmasked." This was followed by "I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan," and "The Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A."
Kennedy's agitating didn't win him any friends.
Also in later years, his writings were followed by controversy: While many thought "The Klan Unmasked," had been a work of non-fiction, it turned out to be a fact-based novel.
Nonetheless, a Times-Union review found that didn't deter from the fact that Kennedy did risk his life simply by going undercover to Klan meetings, and by writing stories and providing information about them to the authorities.
That still took some doing. Because at that time, many people either supported the Klan or hoped that, like the weather, the hatred too would soon pass.
What also took some doing was Kennedy's decision to put himself on the front lines of that battle against segregation and injustice.
He joined black protestors in 1960 who were trying to desegregate downtown department store lunch counters, and he was on the scene on Aug. 27 of that year - the day which would come to be known as Ax Handle Saturday. That was when a mob of angry whites attacked black protestors with ax handles - leaving them and the city's history bloodied.
And Kennedy also earned himself a letter of appreciation from King for his dispatches on the civil rights movement.
For most of the remainder of his life Kennedy continued to work for civil rights and social justice. But since he never got around to writing his own story, I'm left to wonder about how he managed to push himself to do the work that he did.
It would have been easy enough for him to do nothing - or to confine his activism to his writings. Kennedy was, after all, a white man who didn't have to deal with the indignities of Jim Crow. He had the luxury of leaving those changes to time and fate.
But he didn't.
So in the week that King's memorial was unveiled, here in North Florida we lost an icon that had, for decades, embodied what he once called the "ultimate measure of a man."
Said King: "[It] is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
That was a measure that Kennedy lived up to - and I'm sure that somewhere, King is saying, "Well done."
tonyaa.weathersbee@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4251
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