Stetson Kennedy
| Stetson Kennedy | |
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| Born |
October 5, 1916 Jacksonville, Florida United States |
| Died | August 27, 2011 (aged 94) Jacksonville, Florida United States |
| Occupation | Award-winning Author Activist Folklorist |
| Nationality | American |
| Spouse | Sandra Parks (at time of death) |
| Website | |
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William Stetson Kennedy (October 5, 1916 – August 27, 2011) was an American author and human rights activist. One of the pioneer folklore collectors during the first half of the 20th century, he is remembered for having infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s, exposing its secrets to authorities and the outside world. His actions led to the 1947 revocation by the state of Georgia of the Klan's national corporate charter. Kennedy wrote or co-wrote ten books.
Kennedy was named after a member of his mother's family, the hatter John Batterson Stetson. As a teenager, he began collecting folklore material while seeking "a dollar down and dollar a week" accounts for his father, a furniture merchant. While a student at the University of Florida, Kennedy befriended one of his professors, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
In 1937, he left the University of Florida to join the WPA Florida Writers' Project, and at the age of 21, was put in charge of folklore, oral history, and ethnic studies. Kennedy traveled throughout Florida with African-American novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston; serving as her supervisor, they visited turpentine camps near Cross City and the Clara White Mission soup kitchen in Jacksonville. Hurston later chronicled these experiences in her book Mules and Men. The two were forced to travel separately because Jim Crow laws prohibited them from working together. Because of segregation laws operative in Florida at the time, "You could get killed lighting someone's cigarette", Kennedy told independent producer Barrett Golding. "Or shaking hands – both colors, white and black." Hurston was not even allowed to enter the Federal Writers' Project office in Jacksonville through the front door and did most of her work from her home. Kennedy had a large hand in editing several volumes generated by the Florida project, including The WPA Guide to Florida: the Southernmost State (1939), from the famed WPA American Guide Series, A Guide to Key West, and The Florida Negro (part of a series directed by Sterling Brown). Kennedy also studied at New College for Social Research in New York and at the Sorbonne in Paris.
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