Stetson Kennedy:STETSON KENNEDY (94) was a writer who documented daily life in the Depression-era South who will be remembered for his controversial book about the inner workings of the Ku Klux Klan.
As a member of the Federal Writers’ Project, Kennedy worked alongside many famous American authors studying their native regions. He travelled the South describing the struggles of ordinary people.
What was probably his best-known work came out of the 1940s, when he set out to expose the Ku Klux Klan and its efforts to terrorise black people throughout the region. In The Klan Unmasked, published in 1954, Kennedy recounted what he said was his infiltration of the Klan, a secretive organisation about whose inner operations little was known.
He wrote that he presented himself as “John S Perkins”, using the surname of a deceased uncle who was a former Klansman. Full of dramatic dialogue, the volume reads like a hard-boiled detective novel and Kennedy’s portrayal of the Klan suggested horrors as well as absurdities.
In the first chapter, he tells of receiving a 2am phone call and finding the chief of the Klavalier Klub murder squad on the line. Before delivering a “fiery summons”, Kennedy wrote, the chieftain, using a code name, initiated the exchange of passwords.
“White,” his caller prompted.
“Man,” Kennedy returned.
“Native,” the caller said.
“Born,” Kennedy responded.
In recent years, Kennedy has been accused of embellishing his account. His work was featured in the best-selling book Freakonomicsby Stephen J Dubner and Steven D Levitt. But in a 2006 New York Timesmagazine article, they said they had come to have their doubts about Kennedy and his work, suggesting he had worked with an informant and that some of his material came from public events that he attended as a reporter.
Among those coming to his defence were Peggy Bulger, director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and a personal friend. She vouched for his truthfulness. Acclaimed oral historian Studs Terkel also defended him vigorously.
Kennedy told the St Petersburg Timesthat he did "dramatise" some of his work to help it reach a wider audience. "It was hardly a cover-up," he told the Associated Press in 2007.
He has been described as providing information about the Klan’s activities to government investigators and the national media. It was part of what he said was an attempt to bring down those he called “homegrown racial terrorists”. When he was 90, he told the Associated Press that the Klan continued to harass him. He would pick up the telephone to hear threats. “We think about you every time we drive by your house,” the caller would tell him. He cited numerous attempts to burn his home and said that his dog had been shot.
Kennedy’s awareness of discrimination dated to his teenage years, his wife said, when he was a bill collector for his father’s furniture shop. He noted the way people spoke, particularly his father’s African American customers. He dropped out of university towards the end of the Depression and for his 1942 book Palmetto Country, he drove around Florida collecting stories from orange pickers and turpentine gatherers.
Kept out of second World War military service because of a back injury, Kennedy worked for the Anti-Defamation League and the Anti-Nazi League of New York.
When he was a boy, Kennedy was drawn to nature. "I decided to be a zoologist for our own species," he told the Jacksonville-based Folio Weekly, "to look at the human animal – the most screwed-up and dangerous animal, the only real wild animal on the planet".
Kennedy was married seven times. In addition to his wife of five years, Sandra Parks, he is survived by: a son, Loren Kennedy; two stepdaughters, Jennifer Wing Pastore, and Nancy Wing Vuehmann; a stepson, John Howland Wing of Washington; and one grandson.
William Stetson Kennedy: born October 5th, 1916; died August 27th, 2011