GAINESVILLE SUN:

If you go:
‘Soul of a People:
Writing America’s Story’

What: Showing of documentary and Q&A with Stetson Kennedy

When: 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Matheson Museum, 513 E. University Ave.

Admission: Free.

It was the heart of the Great Depression in 1937 when 21-year-old Stetson Kennedy left the University of Florida to join the Federal Writers’ Project.

Kennedy, who at 94 is recognized as one of America’s pioneering folklore collectors, was put in charge of folklore, oral history and ethnic studies as part of a project launched by the Works Progress Administration.

Along with thousands of other unemployed writers (or “would-be writers”), Kennedy set out to document life in a nation on the verge of economic collapse. Today, he is one of a handful of surviving WPA writers.

Kennedy will be in Gainesville on Thursday evening for a showing of the documentary “Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story.” The award-winning film has been described as “a road trip through first-person America,” and it includes interviews with Kennedy, the late Studs Terkel and Douglas Brinkley.

It will be shown at the Matheson Museum, and a question-and-answer session with Kennedy will follow.

The evening is sponsored by the Matheson Museum, Civic Media Center and Alachua County Library District.

For his part of the WPA writers’ project, Kennedy set out to record the stories of Floridians across the state, including workers in turpentine camps near Cross City and those serving meals in the Clara White Mission soup kitchen in Jacksonville. He was field supervisor for Zora Neale Hurston, an African-American novelist and folklorist.

Using a coffee table-sized tape recorder, the pair collected folk sayings and songs that now are preserved in the Library of Congress.

Kennedy made headlines with the publication of his look at the inner workings of the Ku Klux Klan in 1954. Called “I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan” and later reissued as “The Klan Unmasked,” the book was published in France by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Kennedy has continued a long career as a civil rights activist and is the author of seven books. On Saturday, Kennedy and his wife, Sandra Parks, were in Washington, D.C., to attend the One Nation Working Together rally at the Lincoln Memorial.

As he told a reporter there, “It’s been more than three-quarters of a century since President Roosevelt succeeded in bringing together organized labor, the NAACP and other civil rights groups to attack the first (economic) meltdown.”

Kennedy concluded, “I was there in 1932, and I’m here now.”
Sylvia Anne Vandervlis