Stetson Kennedy Wikipedia. William Stetson Kennedy October 5, 1. Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNets sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Sex Education in America A new poll finds that the debate over whether sex education should be taught in schools is over. But the NPRKaiserKennedy School. The Future of Financial Services How disruptive innovations are reshaping the way financial services are structured, provisioned and consumed An Industry Project of. Reviews of Kennedy Western University I had gone to a brick and mortar business college and received 3 Associate Degrees. Having no schools in my. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. ROHzvelt October 27, 1858 January 6, 1919 was an American statesman, author, explorer, soldier, and., 930am Comment Brexit Britain needs a new innovation culture, not just investment, in order to take off. Get the latest news and analysis in the stock market today, including national and world stock market news, business news, financial news and more. The Boeing Companys business is conducted by its employees, managers and corporate officers led by the chief executive officer, with oversight from the Board of. August 2. 7, 2. 01. American author, folklorist, and human rights activist. One of the pioneer folklore collectors during the first half of the 2. Ku Klux Klan in the 1. His actions led to the 1. Georgia of the Klans national corporate charter. Kennedy wrote or co wrote ten books. Childhood and educationeditWilliam Stetson Kennedy, commonly known as Stetson Kennedy, was born on October 5, 1. Jacksonville, Florida to Willye Stetson and George Wallace Kennedy. A descendant of signers of the Declaration of Independence, Kennedy came from a wealthy, aristocratic Southern family with relatives such as John Batterson Stetson, founder of the Stetson hat empire and namesake of Stetson University,34 and an uncle Brady who served as the head Klan official, or Great Titan, of a congressional district. At a young age, Kennedy began collecting Florida folklore material and wrote poetry about Florida nature. His views on race relations in the South were largely influenced by his familys black maid, known only as Flo, whom Kennedy considered almost like a mother. During his childhood in the 1. Klan members beating and raping Flo while she was tied to a tree for sassing whitefolks4 after she questioned a white bus driver who had given her incorrect change. Recalling this incident later in life, Kennedy said, At a very tender age, I became aware that grownups were lying about a whole lot more than Santa Claus,4 in reference to the Klans claims of being Christian patriots. Kennedy attended Jacksonville public schools2 and graduated from Robert E. Lee High School during the Great Depression. In 1. University of Florida, Gainesville UF, leaving in 1. He also studied at the New College for Social Research in New York and at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. Early writing and activismeditIn 1. University of Florida, Kennedy collected boots and blankets for the left leaning Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War against Generalisimo Franco. Kennedy has been called one of the pioneer folklore collectors during the first half of the 2. In 1. 93. 7, he left the University of Florida to join the Federal Writers Project, the federally funded Works Progress Administration WPA initiative created under the New Deal to fund and support American writers during the Great Depression. As part of the Federal Writers Project, the Library of Congress hired archivists to document the diversity of American culture by recording regional folksongs e. For five years, 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. 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 WPAs famed American Guide Series, and The Florida Negro. Kennedys first book, Palmetto Country 1. Georgia writer Erskine Caldwell for his American Folkways Series, was based on unused material collected during Kennedys time with the Federal Writers Project. When it was published, Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress said, I very much doubt that a better book about Florida folklife will ever be written. In 1. 94. 2, Kennedy began working for the CIO, a federation of labor unions for industrial workers. As an editorial director for the CIOs political action committee PAC in Atlanta, he wrote a series of monographs advocating against racist policies such as the poll tax, white primaries, and other restrictions that were routinely used throughout the South to disenfranchise minorities, primarily African Americans, and poor people from being able to exercise their right to vote. Infiltrating the Ku Klux KlaneditKennedy was unable to enlist in the military to serve in World War II because of a bad back, so he decided to channel his patriotism towards combatting racial injustices in the Jim Crow South. He is best known for infiltrating the Georgia Ku Klux Klan and exposing their secrets on the popular childrens radio program The Adventures of Superman, trivializing their rituals. He also targeted the Columbians, an Atlanta based neo Nazi organization. Kennedy said, There were an awful lot of evils abroad in the world at the time, as there still are, but I couldnt help but feel that racism was perhaps the most evil. Working with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Kennedy joined the multiple Klan affiliated organizations under the pseudonym John Perkins in order to gain evidence that could be used to prosecute its members. He obtained information about the Klans Invisible Empire through his own participation and also through a high ranking informant. As soon as he became aware of new details, he shared the Klans secrets with police, prosecutors, journalists, and human rights organizations. In 1. Columbians, Homer Loomis and Emory Burke, who were found guilty. Kennedy claimed that in 1. Klan rituals to the writers of the Superman radio program, intending to strip away the Klans mystique. There was a series of 1. Superman took on the Klan. He claimed that the trivialization of the Klans rituals and codewords likely had a negative impact on Klan recruiting and membership, leading Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt to dub Kennedy the greatest single contributor to the weakening of the Ku Klux Klan in their 2. Freakonomics. However, in 2. Dubner and Levitt cast doubt on the statements of Kennedy, stating the story of Stetson Kennedy was one long series of anecdotes which, no matter how many times they were cited over the decades, were nearly all generated by the same self interested source. Critical assessments from his peerseditIn 1. Ben Green alleged that Kennedy falsified or misrepresented portions of The Klan Unmasked. During the 1. 99. Green had enlisted Kennedys help while researching a book about the still unsolved murders of Florida couple Harry and Harriette Moore, black Civil Rights activists who died of injuries from the bombing of their home on Christmas Eve 1. Eye Candy 5 Textures there. Greens book about the Moores, Before His Time, was published in 1. Green, whose book is generally disparaging of Kennedy, claimed to have examined Kennedys archives at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and Atlanta and he concluded that a number of interviews, portrayed in I Rode With The Ku Klux Klan as having been conducted undercover, had in fact been done openly, and that racist material amassed by Kennedy had also been openly obtained from mail subscriptions to the Klan and similar groups and not surreptitiously, as Kennedy implied. Most seriously, Green accused Kennedy of concealing the existence of a collaborator, referred to as John Brown a pseudonym probably chosen in honor of the 1. John Brown, whom Green alleged was in fact responsible for the most daring of Kennedys undercover revelations. Green also interviewed Georgia State Prosecutor Dan Duke, whom he reported as denying having worked with Kennedy as closely as the latter had claimed. Duke agreed that Kennedy got inside of some Klan meetings but openly disputed Kennedys dramatized account of their relationship. None of that happened, Duke told Green, according to Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt in their New York Times Magazine column of January 8, 2.