Kennedy - The Klan Unmasked: With a New Introduction by David Pilgrim and a New Authors Note

By Charlie Patton

Originally published in the Times-Union, Sunday, January 29,2006

At ninety-three, his health failing, most of his old friends and lovers long gone, Stetson Kennedy occasionally complains that he has lived too long.

But it could be argued he has lived just long enough. Long enough to have passed from pariah to hero, from obscurity to fame.

Once the most hated man in North Florida, to quote what a Florida professor told the St. Petersburg Times, Kennedy has become one of the most honored. Like a figure out of the folklore he once studied and wrote about, his legend has grown, partly because he neglected to set the record absolutely straight.

But on the eve of yet another tribute, the January 30, 2006, gala fundraiser for the Stetson Kennedy Foundation, there was a shadow over Beluthahatchee, the little lakeside cabin in northern St. Johns County where Kennedy has lived since 1972.

On January 8, 2006, journalist Stephen J. Dubner and economist Steven D. Leavitt, authors of the best-selling book Freakonomics, wrote a column about Kennedy in the New York Times Magazine. The authors, who lionized Kennedy in their book, now attacked him. Under the headline Hoodwinked, they questioned whether Kennedy had ever personally infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, an experience he wrote about in his book The Klan Unmasked.

The hero of the Klan story was Stetson Kennedy, a lifelong human-rights agitator who is best-known for having infiltrated the Klan in the 1940s in order to expose its shadowy secrets, they wrote on their Web site, freakonomics.com. As it turns out, however, Stetson Kennedy's own history is pretty shadowy.

COMPARING DOCUMENTS

Sometimes in The Klan Unmasked, Stetson Kennedy takes events that actually occurred and apparently embellishes them for dramatic purpose.

The following is from The Klan Unmasked, concerning an account of the events of February 15, 1947, when Kennedy attended a trial of three officials of Columbians Inc., partly as a potential witness but also as a reporter for PM, a newspaper covering the trial:

I sauntered casually into the Columbian witness-room and sat down. The room was packed with brown-shirted Columbian stalwarts and their Kluxer and wool-hat sympathizers.

For a moment they were too flabbergasted to say anything.

Of all the goddamn nerve! Jett finally exploded, and the whole pack let out a howl and surrounded me. The deputy who was supposed to hold them in line just leaned against the wall and chewed on his toothpick

They asked all the usual baiting questions, and soon got to the $64 one.

Would you let your daughter marry a nigger?

When any two people decide they want to get married, I don't think it's anybody's business what color they are.

Great Gawd! exclaimed Jett, turning to the deputy. Did you hear that?

People been lynched in Georgia for saying less, the deputy agreed.

I think anybody who associates with niggers is trash! a burly new Columbian I had never met hissed.

I think anybody who associates with Columbians is trash! I countered.

At that, the big boy reached into his pocket and jerked out a large switchblade knife. Out of the corner of myeye I could see the deputy was not going to budge. The Columbian let out a roar and lunged at me, the knife aimed at my throat. Just as I was about to duck, he let out a scream of anguish, dropped the knife, and bent over and grabbed his ankle. Ira Jett had given him a powerful kick in his shins.

Goddam you, Perkins or Kennedy or whatever your name is! Jett yelled. I hate your guts as much as anybody! But I don't want our boys to get in trouble by cutting your throat on the fifth floor of the courthouse.

From a story published February 16, 1947, in the newspaper PM of the same account that never mentions the attempt on his life:

In a courtroom corridor, Kennedy found himself surrounded by a group of Columbians he knew from the days when he was a member, under an assumed name, gathering material for his book.

Would you let your daughter marry a Negro? demanded one.

I regard it as an individual right for anyone to marry whoever he pleases, Kennedy replied.

Would you entertain a nigger in your home?

I would; I choose my friends on the basis of character and not complexion.

People have been lynched in Georgia for saying less than that, muttered one of the Columbians.

They go on to say that their column is based on an examination of a few thousand pages of documents in various archives. These included Kennedy's personal correspondence, draft articles, memos, and unpublished interviews.

The primary repository of Kennedy's papers is the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a branch of New York City's public library system in Harlem.

There, on four reels of microfilm, are photocopies of the documents Kennedy was compiling in the 1940s as he researchedand investigated various reactionary hate groups, among them the Ku Klux Klan and the Columbians, a neo-Nazi group that came to brief prominence in Atlanta in 194647.

TIMES-UNION FINDINGS

The Times-Union spent the week of January 23, 2006, examining the microfilmed Stetson Kennedy Collection at the Schomburg Center and came to the following conclusions:

As Dubner and Leavitt contended, The Klan Unmasked is not a straightforward work of nonfiction. Although all of the events described in the narrative are supported by documents in the collection, a few have been embellished and quite a few have been given a slightly different context. A number of incidents described firsthand by Kennedy in the book were actually witnessed by someone else or came from third-party accounts.