Still "Klucked" Up

"Klucked," they called it, as Stetson Kennedy documented it: when the Ku Klux Klan ran most of Florida, KKK members would refer to local governments as being "Klucked."

The late Ku Klux Klan leader and Lake County, Florida Sheriff WILLIS V. McCALL shot and killed unarmed men and got away with it. See Pulitzer prize winning book by Gilbert King, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America (2012) McCALL may have been involved in the December 25, 1951 dynamite murders of Mr. and Mrs. Harry and Harriette Moore in Mims, Florida. My late mentor Stetson Kennedy investigated McCALL and fled to France, hanging out with Jean-Paul Sartre and publishing books on Jim Crow segregation.

This just in: adjoining Marion County, Florida ("Horse capital of the world") is still "klucked" as they say in the KKK -- Marion County Commissioners voted unanimously yesterday to restore the Confederate stars-and-bars battle flag to its place of honor in front of the Courthouse. Now, that's "Klucked" up!

The people of Marion County get the government they elect: here are the lugubrious goobers:



The place that Stetson Kennedy's WPA Writer's Guide to Florida referred to as "the oldest white city in America," St. Augustine, Florida did not get a printing press until 1777, during the British period, and barely has one now.

Only a tiny inside story in today's St. Augustine Record. Methinks this story was deserving more coverage by the Record, whose publisher in 1964 was a KKK ally, printed the locations and times of KKK rallies in advance, printed the names and addresses of African-American school children desegregating local schools, gave prominent coverage of Mayor SHELLEY's threats to arrest, incarcerate, blacklist and ruin the lives of students protesting segregation,and otherwise showed its assets as being totally Klucked up.