41 Facts About Stetson Kennedy

William Stetson Kennedy was an American author, folklorist and human rights activist.

Stetson Kennedy's actions led to the 1947 revocation by the state of Georgia of the Klan's national corporate charter.

William Stetson Kennedy, commonly known as Stetson Kennedy, was born on October 5,1916, in the Springfield neighborhood of Jacksonville, Florida to Willye Stetson and George Wallace Kennedy.

At a young age, Kennedy began collecting Florida folklore material and wrote poetry about Florida nature.

Stetson Kennedy studied at the New School for Social Research in New York and at the Sorbonne in Paris, France.

In 1936, while studying at University of Florida, Stetson Kennedy collected boots and blankets for the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War.

Stetson Kennedy has been called "one of the pioneer folklore collectors during the first half of the 20th century".

For five years, Stetson Kennedy collected Florida folklore, traveling throughout Florida alongside other notable figures such as Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston and folklorist Alan Lomax, among others.

Stetson Kennedy had a large role in editing several volumes for the Federal Writers' Project, including The WPA Guide to Florida and A Guide to Key West of the WPA's famed American Guide Series, and The Florida Negro.

Stetson Kennedy began writing "Inside Out" a column for the Federated Press that ran from 1937 to 1950.

Stetson Kennedy coined the term "Frown Power", when he started a campaign with that name in the 1940s, which simply encouraged people to pointedly frown when they heard bigoted speech.

Stetson Kennedy relied on unused material collected during his time with the Federal Writers' Project for his first book, Palmetto Country.

In 1942, Stetson Kennedy was an editorial director for the CIO's political action committee.

Stetson Kennedy wrote a series of monographs objecting to racist policies like poll taxes and white primaries because they were designed to disenfranchise minorities and poor people.

Stetson Kennedy saw Southern fascist policies as part of an alliance with Northern industrialists to perpetuate a slavocracy, and this thesis was the basis of his second book, Southern Exposure.

The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith helped Stetson Kennedy establish a cover identity as John Perkins.

Stetson Kennedy volunteered for former Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge, who had been voted out of office in 1942.

Stetson Kennedy reported the Klan's various crimes to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, as well as police, prosecutors, journalists, and human rights organizations.

Stetson Kennedy relished the absurd flourishes of Klan lore, such as making "K" the initial letter for most terms, renaming the days of the week "Dark, Deadly, Dismal, Doleful, Desolate, Dreadful, and Desperate", and their Byzantine handbook the Kloran.

Stetson Kennedy was inspired by the success of Under Cover, John Roy Carlson's expose of American Nazis.

Stetson Kennedy includes images of original Klan paperwork like Forms K-111 and K-115, applications for reinstatement and "Citizenship in the Invisible Empire".

Stetson Kennedy fed information to law enforcement and journalists in order to engineer counteractions against the Klan.

Stetson Kennedy even showed up at the House Un-American Activities Committee in his Klan robe to get their attention.

Loomis ran an organization called the Columbians of Atlanta, a neo-Nazi terrorist organization that Stetson Kennedy infiltrated with other operatives.

Stetson Kennedy spent the spring of 1947 on a lecture tour.

Stetson Kennedy moved to Greenwich Village, because the Klan made his native South unsafe for him.

Unlike the journalistic Southern Exposure, where Stetson Kennedy occasionally appears in first person, The Klan Unmasked is written as a potboiler.

Stetson Kennedy combined his exploits with those of other covert operatives in The Klan Unmasked.

Stetson Kennedy eventually identified one as John Brown, who was a disillusioned Klansman.

Stetson Kennedy was acting as his handler, relaying his intelligence reports to the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League that was supporting their work.

Stetson Kennedy traveled to Geneva in 1950 and then to Paris.

Stetson Kennedy traveled extensively behind the Iron Curtain after he took the subway into East Berlin.

Stetson Kennedy met Maria Tanase in Romania, visited the USSR, and Hungary.

Stetson Kennedy's passport expired while he was in Eastern Europe, and he was officially in police custody in Paris until he was issued a new one and was able to return to America.

Stetson Kennedy is featured as one of the "Whistle Blowers", in Studs Terkel's book Coming of Age, published in 1995.

Stetson Kennedy participated in the two-day "New Deal Resources: Preserving the Legacy" conference at the Library of Congress on the occasion of the 75th Anniversary of the New Deal held in March 2008.

In February 2009, Stetson Kennedy bequeathed his personal library to the Civic Media Center in Gainesville, Florida with which Stetson Kennedy had worked since the center's inception.

In 2006, at 90 years old, Stetson Kennedy married writer and bookstore owner Sandra Parks, a former city commissioner of St Augustine, Florida.

In 2005 Stetson Kennedy received a life estate on his 4-acre homestead in Saint Johns County, and it is Beluthahatchee Park.

The park is part of a 70-acre tract that Stetson Kennedy purchased in 1948, recorded restrictive covenants setting aside land in perpetuity as a wildlife refuge, and the following year subdivided, subsequently selling all but his own 4 acre parcel.

Stetson Kennedy died on August 27,2011, at Baptist Medical Center South in Jacksonville, Florida, where he had been in palliative care for several days.