Stetson Kennedy: I'm Glad I Lived So Long

'I'm glad I lived so long'
Activist describes feelings in radio interview

CHAD SMITH
http://staugustine.com/stories/011809/news_0118_040.shtml

On widely-syndicated Public Radio International, Stetson Kennedy on Saturday told the host he didn't think he'd live to see the day Barack Obama, or any black man running for the presidency, would get the kind of reception Obama did while campaigning in Jacksonville.

"I couldn't believe my eyes and ears," Kennedy, a 92-year-old author, activist and St. Augustine resident, said of the Democrat's Jacksonville visit in September.

There were some 20,000 people at the event, and another 8,000 turned away, he told Ira Glass, the host of "This American Life." On the broadcast, the show focused on how people were feeling with Inauguration Day so near.

"What do you make of that?" Glass asked.

"Well, I'm glad I lived so long," Kennedy replied.

Kennedy is probably best known for his crusade against the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and 1950s.

In an interview with The Record, he said it was the disenfranchisement of black and poor white voters in the South that first compelled him to become an activist.

The Jacksonville native said the tax required to cast a ballot all but did away with democracy in the South.

On the radio program he said of his hometown, "Jacksonville was pretty backwards."

But to see the crowd gathered for Obama signaled how far the city and the South had come, he said. To see Obama elected signaled how far the country had, he noted.

In the 1950s he thought to himself, "It would be a thousand years before that happened."

It took just about half a century. But Kennedy, who plans to be in attendance when Obama takes the oath of office Tuesday, said there are still wrongs to be righted in the world.

"It's been a long, hard road, and Obama of course is not the end-all," he said. "It's a new beginning."