Daytona News-Journal columnist Mark Lane re: Stetson Kennedy, 94, folklorist, activist, protest candidate, union organizer, writer and storyteller

Stetson Kennedy: Longtime voice for Florida stilled at 94
By MARK LANE, FOOTNOTE

August 31, 2011 12:05 AM Posted in: Footnote

Folklorist, activist, protest candidate, union organizer, writer and storyteller, Stetson Kennedy was a Florida original. He died Saturday at age 94 near St. Augustine.

He was active up to the end. I spoke with him only last March when he was at Stetson University. Stooped, bald, rheumy-eyed and with malfunctioning hearing aids in both ears, he nevertheless took students' questions and spoke optimistically about the current revolts in the Mideast and how young people are the engines of social change.

The Florida he described to the kids must have sounded like another planet. A place racially segregated by law. A place where slavery was still a living memory to some of the oldest people interviewed by the New Deal's Federal Writers Project in Florida, which Kennedy headed up. A place where women were not admitted to the state's flagship public university, the University of Florida.

Kennedy took a writing course with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings -- but felt he didn't get much out of it. He was Zora Neale Hurston's boss -- but she didn't really pay much attention to him. And Woody Guthrie slept on his couch, plugged his books and wrote a song for his independent senatorial campaign. (It was finally recorded by Billy Bragg and the group Wilco in 1997.)

If you've read his obituaries, you'd think the only thing Kennedy did was infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan using an uncle's name and write the expose, "I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan," later retitled, "The Klan Unmasked."

Although the Klan book had the most impact, my favorite Kennedy book is his 1942 "Palmetto Country." It's a book about Florida's history, plants, politics, folklore, songs, economics, fishing, backwoods lore, the rise of the cigar industry, plus a bunch of random stories he recorded working for the Federal Writers Project.

According to his website, a doctor, checking to see how lucid he was in his last hours, asked him where he was from.

"The planet Earth," he replied.


And it's a planet that will be less rich without him.

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