Stetson Kennedy: A Rabble-Rouser Who Made a Lasting Difference

Stetson Kennedy was a crusader, a rabble-rouser, a folklorist, an author and, truth be told, a tireless self-promoter and a notorious ladies’ man well into his 90s. Kennedy’s colorful and turbulent life, which spanned most of the 20th century, came to an end last month in a Jacksonville hospital.

“He was a giant,’’ said Peggy Bulger, director of The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. “He never quit working. Last time I talked to him he was still full of piss and vinegar.’’
Kennedy is today perhaps best known for infiltrating the nation’s most dangerous hate group and writing about it in a book called I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan, later renamed The Klan Unmasked. Its breathless prose seems a bit overwrought today – more akin to a Mickey Spillane mystery than a serious work of investigative journalism – and even Kennedy admitted that he took some artistic license in places to make sure it was lurid enough to sell.

But no one doubted the cocky Kennedy’s courage. And his revelations cast a harsh spotlight on the Klan and its insidious influence in the 1940s – a time when crossing the Invisible Empire was not safe or even particularly popular.

In fact, after being accused of harboring Communist sympathies and receiving numerous death threats, Kennedy fled to France – temporarily, of course; he could never stay away from Florida for long – where he wrote Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A., a sort of insider’s account about the sorry state of race relations in the Deep South. Although no American publisher was interested, existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre published the book in Paris and arranged for distribution in the United States.

Nobody knew more about the collective mind of the South than Kennedy, who was born in Jacksonville and attended the University of Florida. During the Great Depression, he was a writer and editor of Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State, which was produced under the auspices of the Florida Writers’ Project. Assisting him was Zora Neale Hurston, who had recently published her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

A few years later Kennedy published Palmetto Country, consisting of stories he gathered while driving through Florida and recording the words of the state’s forgotten underclass, including farm workers, fishermen, cigar-makers, hoboes and characters of all sorts. Today, Palmetto Country is considered a classic of social history. Six more books, all dealing with Florida folklore and racial politics, would follow.

Along the way he befriended folksinger Woody Guthrie, a kindred spirit who would arrive, unbidden, at Kennedy’s home, a ramshackle cabin on a swampy 4-acre tract in St. Johns County that he called Beluthahatchee, which means “heaven” in the Seminole Indian language. Guthrie even wrote a song about his friend called Beluthahatchee Bill. When Kennedy launched a quixotic run for the U.S. Senate in 1950, Guthrie also contributed a campaign ditty:

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.

Kennedy was in his 80s when I interviewed him for a magazine profile. He was dapper, soft-spoken, witty and had a young girlfriend in tow. I later learned that he admitted to having been married six times, though the actual number may have been higher. As dyed-in-the-wool Southerners, we enjoyed our talk and I soon found myself with an invitation to join Kennedy, his female friend and a handful of adoring professors for dinner.

When the evening was over, the old firebrand gave me a set of his books and inscribed them: “To Randy, a Southerner who understands.” I don’t know if I understand much about Florida, but I’m pleased to have known someone who did – and who loved it enough to risk his life trying to change it.  l