Kennedy was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1916. He grew up in the 14-room, white-columned house owned by his traditional southern family. The Kennedys boasted blood ties to Confederate war heroes and wealthy cotton planters and prided themselves on carrying on the southern way of life. Kennedy’s mother taught her children traditional values and manners and dutifully attended meetings of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. His father ran a furniture store and served as chairman of the board of deacons at the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville. Insatiably curious, energetic, and sensitive as a boy, Kennedy earned a reputation as the free spirit of the family. His grandmother used to offer him two cents to sit still for two minutes and almost never had to pay him the pennies.
The oldest of five children, Kennedy spent much of his free time exploring the surrounding woods, creeks, orchards, and orange groves. He loved to write stories and poems about the birds, animals, trees, and waterways that defined rural North Florida. In time he began to contemplate the lives of the people who lived on the ramshackle farms and in the small towns in the area. Sensing an injustice in the poverty that gripped the lives of so many, he began to feel a burning passion to do something about it. He was particularly disturbed by the prevailing view that “colored folk” were to be treated as subservient to white people. Although he couldn’t quite understand why, that pervasive racism got under his skin. “It happened early,” Kennedy would recall later in his life. “Whatever it was.” Still, he saw his family as “no more, no less, racist than the norm, par for the course, southern white.”
Shortly after attending that Ku Klux Klan parade, Kennedy began to see the truth about the men in hoods and robes. He had thought the KKK was a club for grown-ups who got to dress up in Halloween costumes year-round until his mother told him that the organization actually kept the folks in “colored town” in line. But his real lesson occurred at the bedside of his family’s African-American housekeeper, whom Klansmen had beaten for the offense of talking back to a white streetcar operator who had shortchanged her. Hearing the woman describe the brutal attack, Kennedy realized that the men behind the masks were bullies who terrorized innocent black people. He began to detest the ingrained racism that infected the world around him and to feel out of step with those who accepted it. “I’ve always felt like an alien in the land of my birth,” he recalled later.
At Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville, Kennedy’s attitude toward race made him as much an outsider as Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were hundreds of miles away at Glenville High. Kennedy refused to play along with classmates who taunted their colored servants or knocked black newspaper boys off their bikes for fun.
“What’s up with Stet?” his friends would ask.
“What’s up with all of you?” Kennedy thought. Confused by the pervasive antiblack attitudes, he found little support from other white kids.
At the dinner table one of his three sisters once said, “I do believe you’d rather be with niggers than with us.”
Kennedy replied, “As a matter of fact, I would.” He then got up and stomped out of the room. The white adults around him shared the view that blacks were inferior to whites—particularly the uncle who kept a hood and robe in his closet.
As a young man Kennedy worked at his father’s furniture store in hopes of using his earnings to see the world or to attend college. As part of his job he traveled from door to door and farm to farm to collect payments on furniture that had been sold for “a dollar down and a dollar a week.” Sitting with poor white and black men and women struggling to put food on the table, he often put away the payment book, took out a notebook, and drew out the stories of their fascinating lives and daunting hardships. While Jerry and Joe were surrounding themselves with stories of space travelers and wise-cracking detectives, Kennedy was immersing himself in stories of former slaves and tenant farmers. While Jerry and Joe were dreaming up a superhero to protect regular people, Kennedy was beginning to think about becoming a writer too—but the kind of writer who would tell the stories of regular people in order to help them with real problems.
In 1936 Kennedy enrolled at the University of Florida and spent a year studying history and writing. He became more articulate about his critique of racism in the Deep South and the rest of the country. He recalls thinking, “Don’t ask me what was wrong with me. What was wrong with the rest of the state, and South, and nation, and world, that was engaged in that sort of oppression of one people over another?”
After only a year at the university Kennedy’s headstrong ambition and restless spirit propelled him faster than classes, papers, and exams would allow. He placed a load of books on a boat and shipped them off to Key West. He then hitchhiked down to the Keys, caught up with the books, married a local girl, and began a job as a junior interviewer with the Works Progress Administration Florida Writers’ Project, a New Deal program that provided work to unemployed writers, editors, historians, and researchers.
The writers’ task was to record the life stories, tall tales, folk songs, and fables of ordinary people. They used a clumsy recording machine with a sapphire needle that cut sound directly onto a 12-inch acetate disc. Kennedy recalls, “We traveled backroads the length and breadth of the Florida peninsula, toting a coffee-table-sized recording machine into turpentine camps, sawmills, citrus groves, the Everglades, out onto railroad tracks, and aboard shrimp trawlers—wherever Florida folks were working, living, and singing.” By age 21, Kennedy was earning $37.50 every two weeks and felt like “a kid on a treasure hunt.”
Within a year Kennedy was leading a team of story and song gatherers on expeditions across the state. He gained a deep understanding of how folktales, songs, and rituals form the glue that holds society together. At one stop, while setting up the recording machine to capture folk songs from a group of black singers, he was surprised when one woman broke into prayer. “Dear Lord, this is Eartha White talkin’ to you again,” that recording begins. “I just want to thank you for giving mankind the intelligence to make such a marvelous machine, and a president like Franklin D. Roosevelt who cares about preserving the songs people sing.”
In his travels Kennedy was particularly moved by his visits to turpentine camps—squalid encampments set deep in the woods where black workers stripped the bark off pine trees and drained the sap into buckets to make turpentine. The camp hands worked dreadfully long hours, and the company docked their paychecks for the privilege of eating its corn-meal mush and sleeping in its grim shanties, which resembled the ramshackle huts that slaves once occupied. This arrangement placed the workers in constant debt to the company, which held them as virtual prisoners constantly working to try to pay off their debt. Kennedy asked one elderly worker, “Why don’t you leave and get out of it?”
The man responded, “The onliest way out is to die out.”
As Kennedy captured the stories of turpentine campers, Native American healers, and shantytown fishermen, Jerry and Joe were churning out the first panels of Superman a thousand miles away in Cleveland. As Kennedy recorded blues songs of poor black field hands, Jerry and Joe produced images of Superman collaring hoodlums and saving Lois Lane.
IN 1940 STETSON KENNEDY left his folklore-collecting job. He planned to concentrate more on his writing. He could use the information and insight gained from his childhood encounters with the poor, his studies at the university, and his experience as a folklorist to expose deep-seated racism and the threat posed by the Ku Klux Klan. As a folklorist Kennedy knew that the Klan used its invented rituals, concocted language, and biased belief system to imbue otherwise weak men with a sense of mastery and power. Kennedy knew the typical Klansman felt like a bigger man after taking part in mysterious rituals, speaking in a secret language, or attacking people judged to be inferior. Kennedy wanted to sweep away the mystique—to show the Klan as nothing more than a violent hate group selling a fantasy of the past. He wanted to expose the KKK’s false premises, bogus beliefs, secrets, and fake mysticism and to let ridi
cule, rejection, and scorn “melt the cultural glue” that held the club together. “The main idea was to make bigotry obnoxious.” He attacked the Klan with confidence and zeal.
Naturally Kennedy was just a person and had no superpowers, but he was well aware of the power of words. His friend and frequent houseguest Woody Guthrie—the famed folksinger who wrote “This Land Is Your Land”—often used a one-line answer to friends who asked, “Where’s Stet?” Guthrie would reply that Kennedy was making more ammo with his typewriter upstairs in the attic.
Using that ammo, Kennedy embarked on a campaign to correct the historic and journalistic record of the KKK. He told himself to write as much as possible, focusing on exposés that revealed the real inner workings of the Klan. More newspaper articles. His pieces countered those of mainstream journalists who described KKK ceremonies with such terms as “mystic,” “eerie,” and “awesome.” More magazine articles. He criticized journalists who presented the KKK side of the story as a valid point of view in the contemporary political debate. More exposés. He criticized respected encyclopedias that described the secret order as a legitimate political organization comprised of white protestant men dedicated to protecting the white Christian race from the threat of Negro uprising, Jewish dominance, and widespread immorality. He knew the Klan would fight back. After all, it had been silencing its critics for a long time.
* CHAPTER 7 *
THE ORIGINAL KLAN
OVER THE YEARS historians have contended that the original Ku Klux Klan was a joke. Literally. Drawn mainly from the work of southern writers who were close to the secret society’s founders and often repeated to this day, the story goes like this: The original Klan began as a social club for a handful of men with time on their hands, a taste for the absurd, and a penchant for harmless mischief. In the spring of 1866, in the town of Pulaski, Tennessee, a half dozen men met at the office of a prominent attorney to dream up a diversion from the doldrums of small-town life.
Just back from the Civil War with no immediate plans for the future, the former Confederate officers decided to form a social society much like the student fraternities gaining popularity on college campuses. The founders struggled to come up with a name until one man threw out the word kuklos—Greek for “circle” or “band.” His fellow brainstormers quickly added the word “clan” but started it with a K to harden the alliteration and to add a touch of mystery. After a bit of back and forth the founders had their name: Ku Klux Klan. They liked the sound of it. It felt like bones rattling in the closet.
Building on the mysterious name, the “circle of brothers” added weird wardrobes, unusual rituals, mysterious code words, and absolute secrecy to the group. Members were required to wear handmade robes that flowed to the floor and high, pointed hoods that added two or three feet to their height. The officers were given titles drawn from mythology or just made up on the spot. The chief officer was the Grand Cyclops, his assistant was the Grand Magi, and the rank and file were Ghouls.
After outgrowing their original meeting place, as local lore has it, the Klan moved to a more alluring venue: the ruins of an old farmhouse that had been decimated by a storm, engulfed with fallen trees, and rumored to be haunted. In strange midnight ceremonies the men donned their ghostly garb, recited their rambling incantations, pledged vows of secrecy, and indoctrinated new recruits. In time, the robed and hooded figures, masquerading as ghosts of Confederate soldiers returning from the battle-field, mounted horses and rode through neighboring farms and villages. The ghastly, ghostly figures told shocked onlookers that they had not had a drink since the Battle of Shiloh and had rode twice around the world since suppertime. Soon dozens of new dens had formed throughout the region, and sightings of hooded night riders were commonplace. Major newspapers speculated that this mysterious secret order must have a greater mission—for good or evil.
BY THE BEGINNING OF 1867, with the movement spreading beyond the control of its founders, the first Klansmen invited all known dens to a secret convention in Nashville to elect a leader, to draft a constitution, and to set a course for the future. The convention elected former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest as Grand Wizard (supreme leader) and designated the entire South as the territory of the new Invisible Empire. The empire was divided into realms that generally corresponded with states, dominions that corresponded with congressional districts, and dens that would serve as local chapters. Former military officers were bestowed with such titles as Grand Dragon, Grand Titan, and Grand Giant, and the rank and file remained the Ghouls. The Klan constitution—or prescript—expressed allegiance to the U.S. government but also asserted the power to interpret and enforce the law. In effect this declaration made the KKK judge, jury, and executioner of its own version of law and order.
KKK leaders also positioned the organization as the front line of opposition to Reconstruction, the federal effort to repair the damage caused by the Civil War. The South had just lost the war, and the vast majority of white Southerners were furious about the new Reconstruction Act of 1868, which mandated northern military occupation of much of the South, invalidated most of the region’s state governments, and decreed that the rights of newly freed slaves would be guaranteed—by force if necessary. The opponents of Reconstruction dubbed the northern intruders as carpetbaggers, their southern supporters as scalawags, and African Americans as inferiors. They vowed to resist what they saw as the unfair trampling of their rights. The KKK would become their army.
In the weeks after the convention General Forrest’s old soldiers transformed themselves into terrorists, forming paramilitary units to wage a guerrilla war against carpetbaggers, scalawags, and Negroes. Cloaked in white robes and hoods and armed with rifles, whips, and swords, the ex-Rebel troops took their places as the foot soldiers of the KKK. The Ghouls set out on raiding parties that targeted supporters of Reconstruction, white or black. They lashed white teachers at Negro schools with bullwhips and burned their schoolhouses to the ground. Freed slaves who spoke out for equality were dragged from their homes and beaten—even burned—in front of their children. Black men charged with crimes were broken out of jail and hanged in plain view without a trial. In remote areas raiders tarred and feathered their victims. Once the tar cooled it stuck to the victim’s skin, and removing it left survivors scarred for life.
Many newspapers characterized the raids as acts of self-defense on behalf of the entire white race. The apologists of the Klan recast its atrocities as heroics and spread fanciful myths about its origin and purpose. For example, most white Southerners believed that the club chose the name Ku Klux Klan not because of its mysterious sound but because it simulated the sound of cocking and discharging a firearm.
By 1870 KKK atrocities had grown so extreme that editors of respected newspapers were denouncing the violence and national political leaders were demanding an end to it. In the South prominent citizens began dropping out of the organization—although common thugs filled their places and used the robes and hoods as cover for crimes ranging from chicken theft to bank robbery. Fearful of being prosecuted, General Forrest finally declared that the organization had been “perverted” and ordered his followers to stand down. He ordered that hoods and masks be burned, records be destroyed, and night-riding violence be halted. A few heeded the call. Most did not. In the end Congress launched a massive investigation, filling 11 volumes with evidence of an unprecedented reign of floggings, beatings, burnings, shootings, hangings, and torture over a four-year span. In 1872 Congress passed a law allowing Klansmen to be tried in federal court, and government troops moved in to mop up the diehards.
By the mid-1880s the Klan was mostly gone—but so were the carpetbaggers and scalawags. The Reconstruction program, mired in scandal, steeped in controversy, and exhausted by struggle, was largely abandoned. The federal government let the South deal with its own problems. The old white ruling class regained power and restored white supremacy as the rule of law. Black people were essentially denied the vote, for
ced into servitude, and persecuted for even questioning the system. Historians generally glossed over the old KKK atrocities, while southern novelists romanticized them with elaborate tales of a valiant masked and hooded army that rode at night to save the downtrodden white race from the dual horrors of northern tyranny and black rule. As the nation moved toward a new century, the Klan remained much as it had started—shrouded in mystery.
* CHAPTER 8 *
BACK FROM THE DEAD
THE PRIME MOVER of the next rising of the KKK was William J. Simmons, the son of a Civil War veteran from the Deep South. His father had ridden with the original night riders during Reconstruction. As a boy growing up on his family’s farm in the hamlet of Harpersville, Alabama, Simmons first heard the romanticized accounts of valiant, hooded night riders and saw the fear in the eyes of black servants and field hands who had felt their wrath.
As a young man Simmons left the farm, served an undistinguished tour of duty in the Spanish-American War, and returned home to make his mark. He trained to be a minister and took to the preaching circuit, only to be drummed out of the Southern Methodist Episcopal Church for “ineffectiveness and moral failings.” Still searching for a life path, Simmons moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and found work as a salesman and college lecturer before taking a job promoting fraternal organizations much like today’s Elks, Masons, and Shriners. Rising to the rank of colonel in the Woodmen of the World, Simmons proudly told friends and associates that he was now a professional “fraternalist”—and he dreamed of resurrecting the fraternity of the KKK.
Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan Page 4
