Only 101 years ago today, my late friend and mentor, Wm. Stetson Kennedy was born.
Stetson was a "freedom fighter," and that's exactly how he described me (in an inscription he wrote to me in signing one of his several books).
Wonderful news -- It turns out that Stetson left more books to be published. See Charlie Patton story, below:
Upon our second meeting, he called me "Stetson Kennedy, Junior" (as we were examining unexpurgated FBI files he obtained on the dynamite murder in their bedroom of NAACP activists Harry and Harriette T. Moore in Mims, Florida on December 25, 1951). On his way to the hospital for the last time in 2011, Stetson told his seventh wife, Sandra Parks, that he wanted the Moores to be honored and remembered. I've suggested that they be included in Statuary Hall, in Washington, D.C. Step one has been accomplished: Florida's legislature and governor have acted to remove the offensive statue of a Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith, a reprobate who had African-American prisoners of war murdered. Step two will come early next year, when the Moores statue may be voted to replace that of General Edmund Kirby Smith, a native of St. Augustine.
Dr. Peggy Bulger spoke about Stetson's life last month at the Florida Heritage Book Festival: her Ph.D. thesis on Stetson is now a book.
Here are a few articles about my friend and mentor, American civil rights hero Stetson Kenndy:
Posted October 4, 2016 03:51 pm - Updated October 4, 2016 09:23 pm
By Charlie Patton charlie.patton@jacksonville.com
Jacksonville Times-Union
Stetson Kennedy’s papers, now at UF library, include a number of unpublished book-length manuscripts
During Stetson Kennedy’s long life — he died at 94 in 2011 — only seven of his books were published.
But Kennedy, whose 100th birthday is Wednesday, apparently remained prolific, even in the three decades between the publication in 1959 of his fourth book, “Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A.,” and the re-publication in 1989 of 1946’s “Palmetto Country.”
That led to renewed interest in Kennedy’s life as a folklorist, crusading journalist and passionate advocate of human rights and to the re-publication in 1990 of “The Klan Unmasked,” his tale of infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan, originally published in London in 1954 as “I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan.” Three more books were published in his lifetime and one has been published posthumously.
Will there be more posthumous books published?
Since 2013, when 202 linear feet of manuscripts were delivered to the University of Florida’s P.K. Yonge Library, James Cusick, the library curator, has been sorting the papers and discovering a number of book-length manuscripts in various states of completion.
By 1946, when he was 30 years old, Kennedy had completed the first draft of an autobiography he intended to title “White Boy,” his inspiration being Richard Wright’s “Black Boy,” a semi-autobiographical novel published in 1945.
“He continued adding to it, revising it, up until the end of his life,” Cusick said.
The first draft is in near publishable form, Cusick said. “It is kind of close to the form where he was ready to sit down with an editor.”
Whether Kennedy’s plan as the years passed was to publish that as a separate autobiography or make it part of what he was calling “Dissident at Large,” an autobiography covering his entire life, is unclear.
Kennedy’s widow Sandra Parks favors publishing the early autobiography as “Florida Boy.”
The manuscript for “White Boy” is in a style somewhat like “The Klan Unmasked,” a first-person active narrative, Cusick said. He said it reminded him of the voice of Philip Marlowe, the detective narrator of Raymond Chandler’s novels.
The manuscripts for “Dissident at Large” are of great interest because they reflect on “the invisible near decade of his life in Europe,” the period from about 1952 to 1960, Cusick said.
“It’s almost like a foreign correspondent report,” Cusick said. “For instance his account of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He was there when the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest.”
Those manuscripts also detail Kennedy’s travels through Russia and Mongolia into China in 1954-55.
While, like the first draft of “White Boy,” the early version is something that is probably ready to go to an editor, “the challenge would be to maintain Stetson’s voice and style,” Cusick said. “… But if somebody wants to do a biography of him, it’s fantastic material.”
The manuscript “Sex on Earth,” reflects a different side of Kennedy, “Stetson the ethnologist and anthropologist looking at the bonds between male and female,” Cusick said. “Very early on in life Stetson was interested in being a zoologist. But eventually he decided the most interesting animals are human beings.”
The strangest book-length manuscript Cusick found was “Lemon and Mullet.” He assumed from the title it would be another look at Florida folklore like “Palmetto Country” and “Grits and Grunts: Folkloric Key West,” published in 2010. Instead, it turned out to be a massive manuscript consisting of police reports Kennedy had written in the 1970s and 1980s, for the Florida Star, a newspaper targeted at Jacksonville’s African-American population.
“His idea was that if he compiled them all and wrote an introduction, it would offer a glimpse into what street life was like in Jacksonville in the ‘70s and ‘80s,” Cusick said. “As a research tool it’s quite interesting. As a manuscript it’s unpublishable.”
In addition to the book length manuscripts, the papers represent “a pretty good compilation of Stetson’s journalistic writings beginning in high school,” Cusick said. “Things that spark controversy today Stetson was writing about 50 or 60 years ago.”
While there are papers left to be examined, Cusick said the library is close to beginning to place items from the collection online. That includes a lot of audio, film and video, some of which is also being digitized so it can go online.
“Stetson always had a tape recorder with him and sometimes his talks were videotaped or taped,” Cusick said. “The first thing that will go online is a lecture he gave at the University of Nantes in 1990, a really nice one.”
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Posted September 30, 2016 12:01 am
By JARED KEEVER jared.keever@staugustine.com
St. Augustine Record
STETSON’S CENTENNIAL: Famed human rights activist and folklorist remembered with a month of events
Sandra Parks, widow of writer and human rights activist Stetson Kennedy, is pictured inside her downtown St. Augustine home on Thursday, September 29, 2016. Sitting alongside a collection of international editions of his works, she holds in her hands a Swiss edition of his famous book , “I rode with the Ku Klux Klan, later released as The Klan Unmasked.”
christina.kelso@staugustine.com A photograph of writer and human rights activist Stetson Kennedy in the mid-1940s at a speaking engagement after infiltrating and exposing the Ku Klux Klan sits alongside a collection of calling cards from klans throughout the nation and a framed Klan-Busters of America T-shirt inside the downtown St. Augustine home of his widow Sandra Parks on Thursday, September 29, 2016.
When Stetson Kennedy died in a Jacksonville hospital in August 2011, he was a little more than a month away from his 95th birthday. It was the end of a life that the famed human rights activist and folklorist had packed full of stories and fights for his favorite causes.
“Stetson never seemed to believe he was old,” his widow, Sandra Parks, said Thursday.
Seated in a window seat at Hot Spot Bakery and Cafe on Granada Street, Parks, 75, reflected on her late husband’s life and what he might have thought about his upcoming centennial celebration. Kennedy would have turned 100 on Oct. 5.
That will be the day of the Stetson Kennedy Birthday Celebration to be held at the Wilson Center on the south campus of Florida State College at Jacksonville.
The event kicks off a month’s worth of events meant to honor the man who famously infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and lived to write about it in the book now titled “The Klan Unmasked.”
Events following the birthday celebration include a private concert to be performed by recording artists Billy Bragg and Sarah Lee Guthrie — granddaughter of Kennedy’s longtime friend, Woody Guthrie — at Kennedy’s old cottage on Lake Beluthahatchee on Oct. 14. Guthrie and Bragg will perform again during the Magnolia Music Festival at the St. Augustine Amphitheater the following evening.
There is another concert, titled “Showcase for Political Thought in Music,” scheduled for Oct. 23, also at Beluthahatchee, and a chorale celebration presented by the Sigma Alpha Iota Women’s Chorale Society, scheduled for Nov. 6 at the University of Florida.
It’s a fairly busy schedule, but one befitting a man who Parks, his seventh wife, said never slowed down and worked all his life to be an agent of change as well as to protect the environment and preserve folk culture and folk life.
“At the time of his death he had just approved the cover for what he called his ‘latest last book,’” she said.
Parks rattled off a list of accomplishments from Kennedy’s final years including the publication of two books, traveling to folk singer Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday celebration, and pushing a walker from the Valencia Street home where he lived with Parks to the Flagler College auditorium to speak before a state legislative redistricting committee and rail against the use of computer models to draw district lines. He called it “the 21st century version of the poll tax,” Parks said. Kennedy gave his last public speech on the 4th of July in Gainesville, less than two months before he died.
“His last years show us that what most people believe about aging, may limit us in what we expect to do for ourselves,” Parks said.
“Right to the end of his life Stetson seemed to think that people needed to understand what he believed about this democracy,” she added.
If that’s the case, then he would likely be pleased that people are still talking about him and working hard to make sure his story is told.
Two significant developments since his death, Parks said, are the organization of many of his papers in an archive at the University of Florida’s P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History and the development of a reader’s theater that performs pieces of Kennedy’s work and helps raise money for the Jacksonville-based charity Young Minds Building Success.
There is also a documentary about Kennedy, titled “Klandestine Man,” in the works. It’s in post-production now and is due out sometime in 2017 or 2018, according to Yael Luttwak, a producer and director with production company Spark Media. The company is currently running an IndieGoGo fundraising campaign to gather the money needed to bring the project to fruition.
It’s a cause that, Parks said, anyone interested in Kennedy’s legacy should consider supporting.
Not only will the finished project spread Kennedy’s story to a wider audience, the production company has agreed to hand over all of the audio and visual files — compiled over years of covering the man — to the archives in Gainesville, she said.
“In a nutshell, it’s the best birthday present anyone could give Stetson Kennedy,” his widow said. “It’s going to create a resource that extends far beyond Stetson.”
Parks speaks happily of the man she was married to for five years and knew for eight. Her stories suggest his life was one lived without regret, with purpose and perhaps best summed up by something he used to tell others.
“If you want a long life, pick a cause and stick to it,” she said, quoting her late husband. “If you want a good, long life, be sure it’s a good cause.”
“That’s my guy,” Parks said. “He had the greatest one-liners.”
For more information about Kennedy and the events surrounding his centennial, visit www.stetsonkennedy.com.
To contribute to the production of “Klandestine Man,” visit www.indiegogo.com/projects/klandestine-man.
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