Klan buster Stetson Kennedy still active at 90

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — Stetson Kennedy still gets threatening phone calls, six decades after he gained fame for infiltrating and exposing the Ku Klux Klan and other domestic terrorist groups.

In some, the caller says, “This is Klan.”

To which Kennedy replies, “This is Klan buster.”

Another caller says, “We think about you every time we drive by your house.”

Kennedy, who turned 90 in October, is not letting age or the Klan slow him down. He’s working on his autobiography, “Dissident-at-Large,” and another book on Key West. Kennedy, who is miffed at recent allegations that some of his writings about the Klan were fabricated or exaggerated, is also giving a speech this month at the Pentagon. To top it off, he just got married for the seventh time.

“He gets more serious work done in a day than most people half his age,” said author and bookstore owner Sandra Parks, who married Kennedy in November. “I have to run to keep up with him.”

Born in Jacksonville and a maternal relation to John B. Stetson, the hat manufacturer, Kennedy was exposed early to the inequities of segregation and treatment of minorities — his maternal grandfather was a lieutenant in the Confederate Army and an uncle belonged to the Klan. And as a writer for the Florida Writers Project in the 1930s, he continued to see the evils of segregation, extreme poverty based on race and class and forced labor. A black colleague was forced to sleep in her car at hotels or with the maids.

He began his crusades against what he called “homegrown racial terrorists” during World War II after he was deemed unworthy for military service because of a back injury. He served as director of fact-finding for the southeastern office of the Anti-Defamation League and served as director of the Anti-Nazi League of New York.

“All my friends were in [the] service and they were being shot at in a big way. They were fighting racism whether they knew it or not,” Kennedy said. “At least I could see if I could do something about the racist terrorists in our backyard.”

Using evidence salvaged from the Grand Dragon’s wastebasket, he enabled the Internal Revenue Service to press for collection of an outstanding $685,000 tax lien from the Klan in 1944 and he helped draft the brief used by the state of Georgia to revoke the Klan’s national corporate charter in 1947.

Kennedy infiltrated the Klan by using the name of his deceased uncle as a way to gain trust and membership. But the Klan did not know that Kennedy was giving its secrets to the outside world, including the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Anti-Defamation League and Drew Pearson, a columnist for The Washington Post.

When he learned of plans for the Klan to take action, he would make sure it was broadcast, thwarting them.

“They were afraid to do anything. They knew that somebody was on the inside. They had first-class detectives looking, and I was trying hard not to be caught,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy said he always feared exposure and remains scared “nonstop, to date,” mentioning threats, the shooting of his dog and frequent attempts to burn his home.

In the late 1940s, Kennedy took his fight against the Klan to a national stage when, while working as a consultant to the Superman radio show, he provided information to producers on information about the Klan from their rituals to secret code words. The episodes were titled “Clan of the Fiery Cross.”

“Exposing their folklore — all their secret handshakes, passwords and how silly they were, dressing up in white sheets” was one of the strongest blows delivered to the Klan, said Peggy Bulger, director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. She has been a friend of Kennedy for about 30 years and did her doctoral thesis on Kennedy’s work as a folklorist.

“If they weren’t so violent, they would be silly,” she said.

He testified before a federal grand jury in Miami about the Klan chain of command in the bombing death of Florida NAACP leader Harry Moore and bombings aimed at black, Catholic and Jewish centers in Miami.

He presented evidence in federal court in Washington, D.C., of Klan bombings and other violence aimed at preventing blacks from voting in the 1944 and 1946 elections.

With the Klan posting $1,000-a-pound bounty on his head, Kennedy traveled to Europe in 1952 and testified in Geneva before a United Nations Commission about forced labor in the South. He traveled through Eastern and Western Europe for several years and published “I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan,” which was later renamed “The Klan Unmasked.” The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre published Kennedy’s book “The Jim Crow Guide” in 1956.

“The truth of the matter is, I never aspired to be a writer. Writing was a means to the end,” Kennedy said. “I can’t recommend it, there’s no money in it.”

Recently, Kennedy had to deal with allegations from the co-authors of “Freakonomics,” Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, that he misrepresented portions of “I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan.”

Kennedy critic Ben Green, a Tallahassee writer about the civil rights era, agrees that some of Kennedy’s work was falsified.

“He’s done some very admirable things: he stood up against the Klan at a time when that was an unpopular position ... and he has been a tireless advocate, exposing and reporting on Klan activities for many decades,” Green said. “The problem, and the saddest part of all this, is that what he actually did was apparently not enough for him. So Stetson has felt compelled to exaggerate and embellish what he actually did, and in some cases, make up or take credit for things he didn’t do.”

Kennedy acknowledges that some of the material came from another man who also infiltrated the Klan, but did not want his name used. He said he intermingled his experiences and that of the other man in a narrative to make them more compelling.

“It was hardly a cover-up. I’ve been doing this for too many decades to owe anybody much of an apology,” Kennedy said. “It sort of hurt my feelings.”

Bulger said Kennedy was always candid about his combination of two narratives into one and his purpose was to expose the Klan to a larger audience. Kennedy wrote the book in the style of a Mickey Spillane novel, she said.

“It was common at the time to embellish,” she said. “But he actually did infiltrate the Klan to do this work. He was always up front, he never lied.”

Art Teitelbaum, southern area director of the Anti-Defamation League in Miami, also defended Kennedy.

“There is actual truth and fundamental truth. This doesn’t alter the basic truth of his life, which I think expressed a commitment to human rights and an active opposition to bigotry,” Teitelbaum said. “Stetson worked in the South and he put his life on the line.”

(Associated Press)