Folklife

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.