The third and final presentation in the “Second Saturdays with Stetson Series” is Saturday, March 11, at 2:00 pm, at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science, 2201 Michigan Avenue, Cocoa. The free talk, presented in conjunction with the temporary exhibition “Stetson Kennedy’s Multicultural Florida” will feature Kennedy’s widow, author and educator Sandra Parks.
The items on display in the exhibition “Stetson Kennedy’s Multicultural Florida” include artifacts and images reflecting the diverse Florida communities that folklorist, author, and activist Stetson Kennedy documented throughout the state in the 1930s and ‘40s. Kennedy interviewed Greek sponge divers in Tarpon Springs, Latin cigar rollers in Ybor City and Key West, African American turpentine industry workers, Cracker cowmen, Seminole Indians, and many others.
Also on display are personal items such as Kennedy’s hat, his typewriter, and a letter he received from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the 1940s and ‘50s, Kennedy infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, exposing their secret activities. He continued fighting for equal rights for all people until his death in 2011.
The note from Dr. King, on letterhead from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is dated November 3, 1965. In the letter, King thanks Kennedy for his work in “our struggle for racial justice,” and his “great moral support, not only to myself, but to our entire staff.” King goes on to tell Kennedy that, “You have my heartfelt appreciation for such a worthwhile contribution to the Freedom Movement.”
Visitors to the Brevard Museum are fortunate to be able to see the letter.
“About a month before Stetson died, I asked him ‘where did you put the letter from Dr. Martin Luther King?’” says Parks. “I had begged him for the eight years we were together to please put it in the safety deposit box, and he would never do that. About a month before he died, he pointed to his legal documents file and said, ‘it’s in there.’”
A few days after Kennedy died, Parks began the daunting task of going through stacks of unorganized papers that her husband had saved. She started with the box that was supposed to contain the letter from Dr. King. The letter was not there.
“I had two other people go through the box, just in case I could have missed it,” says Parks. “Somewhere in with the takeout menus and the old phone bills there was a letter from Dr. Martin Luther King we hadn’t found yet.”
The letter was eventually discovered among copies of various newspaper articles, several drafts of an unpublished autobiography, and other personal correspondence.
“People think that this is some kind of scholarly exercise, but it is an endeavor for patience,” Parks says.
Eventually, Parks had fifteen years of accumulated papers sent to the University of Florida to be sorted and archived. That collection is being merged with papers already archived at the University of South Florida.
“In 1996, Stetson sold his then papers to the University of South Florida, along with many of his foreign language edition books that are quite rare and things we cannot find anymore,” says Parks.
Some foreign language editions of Kennedy’s books are currently on display at the Brevard Museum.
The entire collection of Kennedy’s papers is now under one roof at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
“Stetson had been a student at the University of Florida,” says Parks. “He and Sam Proctor, who started the oral history center there, were friends years ago, back when they were both college boys. Most significantly, the WPA papers are there, papers of Zora Hurston’s are there, papers of Marjorie Rawlings are there.”
Kennedy was a pioneer of oral history, had worked for the WPA Florida Writers Project, was supervisor of author Zora Neale Hurston for a time, and took a class at UF from Pulitzer Prize winner Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
“Stetson had hoped that his papers would go to the University of Florida,” says Parks.
The Florida Historical Society, which operates the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science, assembled the exhibition “Stetson Kennedy’s Multicultural Florida” with the assistance of Sandra Parks, the University of Florida, the Florida State Archives, and private collectors.
The Brevard Museum will display the exhibition through May.
Cultural figures from Florida history including Stetson Kennedy, Zora Neale Hurston, and Harry T. Moore will come to life in a performance by the Young Minds Building Success Readers Theater from Jacksonville.
The original production “Stetson Kennedy Legacy: Man in the Mirror” will be performed at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science, 2201 Michigan Avenue, Cocoa, Saturday at 2:00 pm. The presentation is free and open to the public.
Young Minds Building Success Readers Theater is part of a larger effort to provide educational outreach.
“Young Minds Building Success was formed in an endeavor to encourage the individual potential for children and young adults, assist in the needs of families and communities, promote a realistic link between educational services and the needs of the business community, partner with educators, businesses, community leaders, and other organizations,” says executive director Tangela Floyd.
The free performance of “Stetson Kennedy Legacy: Man in the Mirror” is possible because of sponsorship provided by the Stetson Kennedy Foundation.
“Our mission is to do all we can to help carry forward mankind’s unending struggle for human rights in a free, peaceful, harmonious, democratic, just, humane, bounteous and joyful world, to nurture our cultural heritages, and to faithfully discharge our commitment of stewardship over Mother Earth and all her progeny,” says foundation director and Kennedy’s widow, Sandra Parks.
Saturday’s performance is part of the “Second Saturdays with Stetson” series being presented in conjunction with the temporary exhibit “Stetson Kennedy’s Multicultural Florida” at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science. The exhibition commemorates Kennedy’s documentation of our state’s diverse cultural heritage, and his work to foster equality for all.
Folklorist, author, and activist Stetson Kennedy lived from 1916 to 2011.
From 1937 to 1942, Kennedy traveled throughout Florida recording the oral histories, folktales, and work songs of the state’s diverse population. He spoke with Cracker cowmen, Seminole Indians, Greek sponge divers, Latin cigar rollers, African American turpentine still workers, and many others.
This work resulted in Kennedy’s book “Palmetto Country,” originally published in 1942.
The exhibition includes personal items such as Kennedy’s typewriter, hats, and the handwritten lyrics to the Woody Guthrie song “Stetson Kennedy.” An interview filmed with Kennedy in 2008 is part of a video display.
Kennedy worked for the Works Project Administration’s Florida Writers Project as head of the unit on folklore, oral history, and socio-ethnic studies.
“Well, it was the Great Depression, for one thing, and I didn’t have a job along with tens of millions of other Americans,” Kennedy said in 2008. “At the same time, President [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt had organized something called the Federal Writers Project, and I thought this would be an opportunity for a twenty-one-year-old to start a writing career, so I signed up for the Florida Writers Project.”
In addition to being a folklorist and author, Kennedy was a social activist. In the 1940s he risked his life by infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan and exposing their secrets. Using the name John Perkins, Kennedy was able to gather information that helped lead to the incarceration of a number of domestic terrorists. He wrote about his experiences in the 1954 book “I Rode with the Klan,” which was later republished as “The Klan Unmasked.”
“When I went overseas some years later, I thought I’d get away from my nightmares, you know, of being caught,” Kennedy said. “But in Paris, it was raining frequently, and the traffic cops wore white rubber raincoats with capes and hoods, and their hand signals were very much like the Klan signals, so I kept on having nightmares.”
Kennedy continued working until his death in 2011, at the age of 94. His last book, “The Florida Slave,” was published posthumously. His other books include “Southern Exposure,” “The Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was,” “South Florida Folklife,” “After Appomattox: How the South Won the War,” and “Grits and Grunts: Folkloric Key West.”
“Most people are disgusted when they see or hear about prejudice and injustice,” says Tangela Floyd, director of the production “Stetson Kennedy: Man in the Mirror.” “The difference between Stetson and most people is, he did something about it. Readers Theater is our small way of helping to continue his legacy.”
Folklorist, author, and activist Stetson Kennedy was born on October 5, 1916. Had he not died in 2011, Kennedy would have been 100 years old this week.
From 1937 to 1942, Kennedy traveled throughout Florida recording the oral histories, folktales, and work songs of the state’s diverse population. He spoke with Cracker cowmen, Seminole Indians, Greek sponge divers, Latin cigar rollers, African American turpentine still workers, and many others.
This work resulted in Kennedy’s book “Palmetto Country,” originally published in 1942.
The new exhibition “Stetson Kennedy’s Multicultural Florida” will open at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science in Cocoa on November 12, in conjunction with the Florida Frontiers Festival. The exhibition will commemorate Kennedy’s documentation of our state’s diverse cultural heritage.
The exhibition will also include personal items such as Kennedy’s typewriter, hats, and the handwritten lyrics to the Woody Guthrie song “Stetson Kennedy.” An interview filmed with Kennedy in 2008 will be part of a video display.
Kennedy worked for the Works Project Administration’s Florida Writers Project as head of the unit on folklore, oral history, and socio-ethnic studies.
“Well, it was the Great Depression, for one thing, and I didn’t have a job along with tens of millions of other Americans,” Kennedy told me in 2008. “At the same time, President [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt had organized something called the Federal Writers Project, and I thought this would be an opportunity for a twenty-one-year-old to start a writing career, so I signed up for the Florida Writers Project.”
The young Kennedy became the supervisor of writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, who had already published her most famous novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
“She was not an easy one to boss, I can tell you,” Kennedy said. “She fortunately worked out of her home in Eatonville, and I was in Jacksonville, so it was like that. But everything she sent in was a real jewel.”
Peggy Bulger is author of the book “Stetson Kennedy: Applied Folklore and Cultural Advocacy,” which will be released in early November. Bulger came to Florida in 1976, to become the first Florida Folklife Coordinator for the Florida Department of State Division of Historical Resources.
“I started really delving into materials that were done during the WPA,” says Bulger. “Stetson Kennedy, Zora Neale Hurston, Alan Lomax, Herbert Halpert, all of them were folklorists who had worked in Florida back in the ‘30s and ‘40s. I was 25-years-old in 1976, and I thought that anyone who had lived in the 1930s and ‘40s was dead, because that was ancient history.”
Bulger was shocked and pleased to discover that Stetson Kennedy was alive and well and living in Jacksonville.
“I went to see Stetson and I started interviewing him about the WPA and the work that he had done here in Florida,” Bulger says. “Over the course of the years, we became fast friends, from ’76 to when he died in 2011. He really informed the work that I did in Florida.”
Bulger served as director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress from 1999 to 2011.
In addition to being a folklorist and author, Kennedy was a social activist. In the 1940s he risked his life by infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan and exposing their secrets. Using the name John Perkins, Kennedy was able to gather information that helped lead to the incarceration of a number of domestic terrorists. He wrote about his experiences in the 1954 book “I Rode with the Klan,” which was later republished as “The Klan Unmasked.”
“When I went overseas some years later, I thought I’d get away from my nightmares, you know, of being caught,” Kennedy said. “But in Paris, it was raining frequently, and the traffic cops wore white rubber raincoats with capes and hoods, and their hand signals were very much like the Klan signals, so I kept on having nightmares.”
Kennedy continued working until his death in 2011, at the age of 94. His last book, “The Florida Slave,” was published posthumously.
Although he did not live to see his 100th birthday, Kennedy’s legacy lives on in his books, and the inspiration he provides to those following in his footsteps.
Peggy Bulger wanted to follow in Stetson Kennedy’s footsteps. In fact, Bulger wrote her doctoral dissertation about him.
As head of the Florida Writer’s Project for the Works Project Administration in the 1930s and ‘40s, Kennedy traveled throughout the state documenting the traditions, folktales, and folk songs of Florida’s diverse population. He recorded the oral histories of Greek sponge divers in Tarpon Springs, Latino cigar rollers in Ybor City and Key West, Seminole Indians at Big Cypress, and many others.
Bulger came to Florida in 1976, at the age of 25, to become the first Folklife Coordinator for the State of Florida under the Department of State Division of Historical Resources.
“I started really delving into materials that were done during the WPA,” says Bulger. “Stetson Kennedy, Zora Neale Hurston, Alan Lomax, Herbert Halpert, all of them were folklorists who had worked in Florida back in the ‘30s and ‘40s. I was 25 years old in 1976, and I thought that anyone who had lived in the 1930s and ‘40s was dead, because that was ancient history.”
Bulger told someone at the University of Florida archive that she wished some of the folklorists whose work she admired were still alive. She was informed that Stetson Kennedy was alive and well and living in Jacksonville.
“I went to see Stetson and I started interviewing him about the WPA and the work that he had done here in Florida,” Bulger says. “Over the course of the years, we became fast friends, from ’76 to when he died in 2011. He really informed the work that I did in Florida.”
Bulger’s position as the head of the Florida Folklife Program was originally funded by a one year grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
“Bess Lomax Hawes, who is Alan Lomax’s sister, had just started working at the National Endowment for the Arts, and she had created this folkarts program,” says Bulger. “Her vision was that she wanted to place a folklorist in every state in the country to really do the kind of work that the WPA and the Federal Writer’s Project had been doing all over the country during the ‘30s. Back then, in 1976, I was just young enough and naive enough to think ‘oh, it’ll be possible to do a survey of the folkart of Florida in one year.’ I soon found out that would not be the case.”
Bulger was able to find other grant funding to keep her position in place so she and her staff could collect and document the culture of our state. The program continues today.
The Florida Folklife Collection contains manuscripts, photographs, audio and video recordings, and other materials dating from the 1930s to the present. The Florida Folklife Program documents our rich and varied traditional cultures and preserves our heritage through apprenticeship programs and educational outreach.
Some of the work that Bulger is most proud of from her time as Florida Folklife Coordinator is a project that was released as a double album in 1981, called “Drop on Down in Florida: Recordings of Traditional African American Music, 1977 to 1980.”
That project has now been released in digital formats with three times as much material and a 224 page book.
“It’s fieldwork that we did with African American sacred and secular music,” says Bulger. “There were four of us doing fieldwork all over the state.”
Bulger has dedicated her life to preserving tradition cultures, but is philosophical about the fact that change is inevitable.
“I did a documentary on the shrimping industry of Fernandina Beach where I now live,” says Bulger. “When I was doing that documentary in the 1970s, there were over a hundred shrimp boats going out every day. There’s now eight.”
By the time Bulger was working in the 1970s, much of what Stetson Kennedy had documented in the 1930s had changed.
Bulger served as director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress from 1999 to 2011. She then returned to Florida, and is pleased to see the program she developed here going strong.
“It just does my heart so much good to see young scholars coming in and taking over the reins,” says Bulger.
Carrying a cumbersome audio recorder that he called “the thing,” Stetson Kennedy traveled through rural backwoods, swamps, and small towns from north Florida to Key West, collecting oral histories, folktales, and work songs. He spoke with the diverse people of Florida including Cracker cowmen, Seminole Indians, Greek sponge divers, African American turpentine still workers, and Latin cigar rollers.
The result of Stetson Kennedy’s trek through Florida’s multicultural communities was the classic 1942 book Palmetto Country.
Born in Jacksonville in 1916, Stetson Kennedy traveled the world but always returned to Florida. He left his studies at the University of Florida in 1937 to join the Works Progress Administration’s Florida Writers Project, and was soon named the head of the unit on folklore, oral history, and socio-ethnic studies. During this period he was the supervisor of writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, who also collected material for the WPA.
Stetson Kennedy’s work helped to establish the collection of oral history as a valid method of historical research among twentieth century historians. In a 2009 interview, Kennedy reflected on his role as an early oral historian: “I am a great believer in oral history because [of what] I call…the ‘Dictatorship of the Footnote.’ The academicians are quoting each other instead of going out and getting first-hand primary source material. And oral history, of course, is [the perspective of] a participant and a witness, at least, and seeing it with all their sensory organs, and for that reason it has more validity from my point of view.”
While collecting oral histories in Florida’s diverse communities, Stetson Kennedy was particularly moved by the plight of African Americans suffering under the state’s restrictive “Black Codes” and the South’s tradition of “Jim Crow” laws. A social activist as well as an author, Kennedy risked his life by infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan and exposing their secrets. Using the name John Perkins, Stetson Kennedy was able to gather information that helped lead to the incarceration of a number of domestic terrorists. These experiences led to the 1954 book I Rode With the Klan, which was later republished under the title The Klan Unmasked.
Much has been made of Kennedy’s creative choice in The Klan Unmasked to blend information obtained by another KKK infiltrator with his own experiences, presenting them with one narrative voice. The accuracy of the information in his book cannot be effectively challenged, just the style in which the facts are presented.
In 2009, Kennedy recalled his covert study of the KKK: “I first infiltrated during the war, when the Klan was afraid that President [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt might prosecute them under the War Powers Act. So they didn’t put on their robes, and they changed their names to various things like American Shores Patrol and American Gentile Army, and things like that, so that’s how it all began. And, yes, it was exciting, to put it mildly. When I went overseas some years later, I thought I’d get away from my nightmares, you know, of being caught. But in Paris, it was raining frequently, and the French traffic cops wore white rubber raincoats with capes and hoods, and their hand signals were very much like the Klan signals, so I kept on having nightmares.”
Stetson Kennedy continued working until his death in 2011, at the age of 94. His last book, The Florida Slave, was published posthumously. He wrote eight books, and his work as an author, activist, and folklorist has been deservedly well recognized. Kennedy received the Florida Heritage Award, the Florida Governor’s Heartland Award, the NAACP Freedom Award, the Florida Historical Society’s Dorothy Dodd Lifetime Achievement Award, and he was inducted into the Florida Artist’s Hall of Fame.
For more information read Stetson Kennedy’s books including Palmetto Country, The Klan Unmasked, Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A., After Appomattox: How the South Won the War, and The Florida Slave.
Dr. Ben Brotemarkle is producer and host of “Florida Frontiers: The Weekly Radio Magazine of the Florida Historical Society.” The show can also be heard online at myfloridahistory.org.
