Stetson Kennedy, Who Infiltrated and Exposed the Klan, Dies at 94 (NY Times)

August 30, 2011
Stetson Kennedy, Who Infiltrated and Exposed the Klan, Dies at 94
By WILLIAM GRIMES
The New York Times

Stetson Kennedy, a folklorist and social crusader who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and wrote a lurid exposé of its activities, “I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan,” died on Saturday in St. Augustine, Fla. He was 94.

The cause was complications of bleeding of the brain, said his wife, Sandra Parks.

Mr. Kennedy developed his sense of racial injustice early. A native of Jacksonville, Fla., he saw the hardships of black Floridians when he knocked on doors collecting payments for his father’s furniture store. His social concerns developed further when he began collecting folklore data for the Federal Writers’ Project in Key West, Tampa and camps for turpentine workers in north Florida, where conditions were close to slavery.

After being rejected by the Army because of a bad back, he threw himself into unmasking the Ku Klux Klan as well as the Columbians, a Georgia neo-Nazi group. He was inspired in part by a tale told by an interview subject whose friend had been the victim of a racial murder in Key West.

As an agent for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Kennedy, by his own account, infiltrated the Klavern in Stone Mountain and worked as a Klavalier, or Klan strong-arm man. He leaked his findings to, among others, the Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson, the Anti-Defamation League and the producers of the radio show “Superman,” who used information about the Klan’s rituals and code words in a multi-episode story titled “Clan of the Fiery Cross.”

In a celebrated exploit, he stole financial information from a wastebasket outside the office of the Klan’s Imperial Wizard, Sam Roper, in Atlanta.

The information led the Internal Revenue Service to challenge the group’s status as a charitable organization and demand nearly $700,000 in back taxes. He helped draft the brief that Georgia used to revoke the Klan’s national corporate charter in 1947.

After writing a series of articles on the Klan for the left-wing newspaper The Daily Compass — some with datelines like “Inside the Invisible Empire” and “Somewhere in Klan Territory” — he published “I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan” in 1954. It was republished in 1990 as “The Klan Unmasked.”

In 2006, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, the authors of “Freakonomics,” reported in The New York Times that Mr. Kennedy had greatly exaggerated and dramatized his Klan-busting. The authors had interviewed Mr. Kennedy for their book and used his information about Klan symbolism, language and gestures to illustrate an economic point, but in telling Mr. Kennedy’s story they elicited new interest in his claims, especially from a Florida writer, Ben Green.

Mr. Green, while researching the life of Harry T. Moore, a black civil rights advocate murdered in 1952, and collaborating for a time with Mr. Kennedy on the project, read Mr. Kennedy’s archives in Atlanta and at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

Mr. Green concluded that Mr. Kennedy had relied heavily on the experiences of a man identified by the pseudonym John Brown, a union worker and former Klan official who had changed his ways and offered to infiltrate the Klan. Mr. Kennedy later confirmed that he had relied in part on an informant and that he had woven some of his testimony into his first-person account to make it more compelling. But he was unapologetic.

“I wanted to show what was happening at the time,” he told The Florida Times-Union of Jacksonville in 2006. “Who gives a damn how it’s written? It is the one and only document of the working Klan.”

William Stetson Kennedy was born on Oct. 5, 1916, in Jacksonville, where he developed an interest in local turns of phrase and sayings that he called “folksays,” jotting them down in notebooks.

While attending the University of Florida, where he took a writing course with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, he struck out on his own to do field work in Key West. There he married the first of his seven wives, a Cuban who gave him entree into the local émigré community for his folklore work. While gathering material for the Federal Writers’ Project, he traveled across Florida with the writer Zora Neale Hurston.

His Florida research found its way into “Palmetto Country” (1942), a folkloric survey of territory from southern Alabama and Georgia down to Key West, and the series American Folkways, edited by Erskine Caldwell. In 1994 he returned to folklore in “South Florida Folklife,” written with Peggy Bulger and Tina Bucuvalas, and “Grits and Grunts: Folkloric Key West” (2008).

Most of his writing was devoted to campaigns for social justice. A series on racial segregation written with Elizabeth Gardner for The Daily Compass in 1949 formed the basis of “Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A.” His other books included “Passage to Violence” (1954), a fictionalized version of his Klan experiences; “Southern Exposure” (1946), and “After Appomattox: How the South Won the War” (1995).

In addition to his wife, Sandra, Mr. Kennedy is survived by a son, Loren; a grandson, and several stepchildren.

Mr. Kennedy pursued the Klan and racist politicians through a variety of means. In 1950 he ran a write-in campaign for senator. Woody Guthrie, who lived on Mr. Kennedy’s lakeside property near Jacksonville, writing 88 songs there, composed a campaign song for him, titled “Stetson Kennedy,” declaring:

Stetson Kennedy, he’s that man;

Walks and talks across our land;

Talkin’ out against the Ku Klux Klan.

For every fiery cross and note;

I’ll get Kennedy a hundred votes.
Ridicule, too, formed part of Mr. Kennedy’s arsenal. In 1947 he tried, unsuccessfully, to incorporate his own shadow Klan so that he could sue the real Klan whenever it used the same name. He appointed himself Imperial Wizard and installed, as senior officers, an African-American, a Roman Catholic, a Jew, a Japanese-American and a Cherokee.