How Stetson Kennedy Took on the Ku Klux Klan from the Inside
- Cassy Morgan
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
In the early 1940s, while much of the United States was mobilising for war overseas, one young man in Florida found himself excluded from military service. A chronic back condition meant that Stetson Kennedy could not join the United States Army during the Second World War. For Kennedy, then in his mid twenties, the rejection did not dull his sense of obligation. Instead, it redirected it. If he could not fight fascism abroad, he resolved to confront what he saw as its domestic equivalent: organised white supremacist violence in the Jim Crow South.
What followed was one of the most unusual acts of undercover activism in twentieth century America. Over several years, Kennedy infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan and a web of affiliated extremist groups, quietly gathering intelligence, passing information to authorities, and ultimately exposing the organisation to public ridicule through one of the most unlikely platforms imaginable: a children’s radio programme about Superman.
A Southern childhood and an early reckoning
William Stetson Kennedy was born 1916 in the Springfield neighbourhood of Jacksonville, Florida. On paper, he appeared to embody the respectable white Southern establishment. His family tree included signers of the Declaration of Independence and prominent figures such as John Batterson Stetson, founder of the Stetson hat empire and namesake of Stetson University. One of his uncles, known as Brady, held a senior position within the Ku Klux Klan as a Great Titan for a congressional district.
Yet Kennedy’s moral education did not come from drawing rooms or family lore. It came from the family’s Black domestic worker, known to him simply as Flo. Kennedy later described her as being “almost like a mother”. As a child in the 1920s, he witnessed the brutal realities behind the Klan’s self presentation as a Christian fraternal order. Flo was assaulted by local Klansmen after challenging a white bus driver over incorrect change. Years later, Kennedy reflected on the moment with characteristic clarity: “At a very tender age, I became aware that grown ups were lying about a whole lot more than Santa Claus”.
This experience hardened into a lifelong hostility towards racial hypocrisy and organised bigotry.
Folklore, the New Deal, and a training ground for listening
Kennedy’s early career was shaped by words rather than weapons. After attending public schools in Jacksonville and graduating from Robert E Lee High School during the Great Depression, he enrolled at the University of Florida in 1935, leaving two years later without a degree. His education continued informally at the New School for Social Research in New York and later at the Sorbonne in Paris.
In 1937, Kennedy joined the Federal Writers Project, part of the New Deal Works Progress Administration. The project aimed to document American life in all its regional diversity, and Kennedy found his vocation. Travelling throughout Florida, often alongside figures such as Zora Neale Hurston and Alan Lomax, he collected folk songs, oral histories, and everyday stories that rarely made it into official archives.
This work culminated in Palmetto Country, published in 1942. Alan Lomax later remarked that he doubted “a better book about Florida folklife will ever be written”. More importantly, the years spent listening carefully to people, earning trust, and recording detail would later prove invaluable in a far more dangerous field.
Choosing a different battlefield
When the United States entered the Second World War, Kennedy attempted to enlist. His back injury ended that ambition. Rather than accept a desk bound role, he reframed his sense of patriotism. Fascism, he believed, was not only a European problem. In the American South, it wore robes rather than uniforms.
By the early 1940s, Kennedy was already writing forcefully against poll taxes, white primaries, and labour practices designed to disenfranchise poor and minority voters. He described Southern segregation as a form of homegrown authoritarianism, sustained by alliances between political elites and industrial interests.
With assistance from the Anti Defamation League, Kennedy adopted a cover identity. Using the name of a deceased uncle who had once been a committed Klansman, he began attending meetings, joining chapters, and slowly working his way into the internal life of multiple extremist organisations.
Living a double life inside the Jim Crow South
Between 1942 and 1946, Stetson Kennedy existed in a state of constant contradiction. By day, he was a respected writer and labour organiser associated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, contributing articles to progressive publications and continuing his folklore research under the shadow of the New Deal. By night, and often at considerable personal risk, he immersed himself in the clandestine world of white supremacist extremism.
Kennedy did not limit himself to a single organisation. Over the course of four years, he joined or infiltrated as many as twenty interconnected hate groups, ranging from local Ku Klux Klan klaverns to more overtly paramilitary and neo Nazi outfits such as the Columbians of Atlanta. This was not casual observation. He paid dues, attended initiations, memorised oaths, and learned to navigate the internal hierarchies that governed status and influence. Each meeting brought with it the danger of exposure, particularly as rival factions within the Klan were often paranoid about informants.
What distinguished Kennedy from other undercover operatives was his method. He did not simply observe criminal behaviour. He documented the social mechanisms that sustained it. Drawing on his background as a folklorist, he treated the Klan as a belief system sustained by language, ceremony, and repetition. He later remarked that once the pageantry was stripped away, much of the organisation resembled an insecure fraternity desperately clinging to ritual in order to feel powerful.
Atlanta and the climb towards the inner circle
Recognising that meaningful intelligence could only be gathered at the upper levels of the organisation, Kennedy relocated from Florida to Atlanta, then a crucial hub of Klan activity. The city housed influential klaverns, sympathetic politicians, and an extensive network linking law enforcement, business leaders, and white supremacist organisers.
To gain entry, Kennedy exploited the political aftershocks of Georgia’s turbulent gubernatorial politics. By volunteering for and citing connections to Eugene Talmadge, a former governor and outspoken segregationist who enjoyed Klan support, Kennedy secured introductions that would otherwise have been impossible. Although Talmadge was not formally a Klan member, his rhetoric and alliances made him a trusted figure within its orbit.
This manoeuvre allowed Kennedy to gain membership in the Nathan Bedford Forrest Klavern number one, named after the Confederate general and early Klan figure. The klavern was among the most prestigious in the region, drawing members who saw themselves as guardians of Southern tradition and racial order. Within this environment, Kennedy moved carefully, presenting himself as a committed white supremacist while quietly positioning himself close to decision makers.
Meetings, minutiae, and the mechanics of hate
Once embedded, Kennedy adopted a relentless routine. Week after week, he attended meetings held in private homes, rented halls, and rural clearings. He memorised attendance lists, copied internal correspondence, and reconstructed documents from memory when copying was impossible. He paid close attention to who spoke, who deferred, and who issued instructions that later translated into acts of intimidation or violence.
The intelligence he gathered was systematically passed to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, sympathetic journalists, and civil rights organisations. In doing so, Kennedy acted as a clearing house of information, allowing disparate agencies to see patterns that would otherwise have remained fragmented.
His training as a folklorist sharpened his observations. He was fascinated by the Klan’s obsession with symbolism. Ordinary words were replaced with grandiose inventions. Meetings were governed by theatrical titles. Even the days of the week were renamed Dark, Deadly, Desperate, and similar variations intended to evoke menace. The organisation’s handbook, the Kloran, read less like a strategic manual and more like a parody of medieval chivalry.
Kennedy understood that none of this was accidental. Ritual created emotional investment. Complexity discouraged scrutiny. Secrecy transformed mediocrity into mystery.
From secrecy to ridicule
Rather than dismissing these practices as harmless eccentricities, Kennedy recognised them as the glue that held the organisation together. Strip away the mystique, and the Klan’s authority collapsed into farce.
One of his most effective tactics was exposure through mockery. He documented the Klan’s recognition phrases, which were designed to allow members to identify one another without detection. A travelling Klansman seeking contacts in a new town might ask for “Mr Ayak”, a contraction of “Are you a Klansman?”. The correct reply, “I also know a Mr Akai”, meaning “A Klansman Am I”, confirmed allegiance.
By revealing such details to journalists and later to the public, Kennedy rendered the organisation’s secrecy laughable. What had once seemed ominous was suddenly playground material. He later explained that racism struck him as “perhaps the most evil” force he had encountered precisely because it relied so heavily on pretence, inflated language, and false dignity.
Mockery, in this context, was not trivial. It was corrosive. It undermined recruitment, embarrassed existing members, and forced leaders to constantly revise codes and rituals, sowing internal confusion and mistrust.
The Columbians and a public unmasking
The most dangerous phase of Kennedy’s undercover work came in 1947, when his cover identity finally collapsed. After more than a year infiltrating the Columbians of Atlanta, a Klan affiliated neo Nazi group that embraced open intimidation tactics, Kennedy was subpoenaed to testify in court.
The Columbians had staged demonstrations outside the home of a Black couple who had purchased property in a previously white neighbourhood. The action was intended to terrorise rather than protest, combining uniforms, chants, and implied threats of violence.
In court, Kennedy testified against the organisation’s leaders, detailing their structure, intentions, and methods. His evidence helped secure convictions for incitement to riot and for illegally assuming police powers. The case represented a rare moment of accountability for such groups in the Jim Crow South.
It also marked a point of no return. Kennedy’s identity was now public knowledge among extremist circles. Remaining in the region placed him in immediate danger.
Superman versus the Klan
Before that courtroom reckoning, however, Kennedy had already carried out one of the most imaginative acts of cultural resistance in American history. In 1946, he approached the producers of The Adventures of Superman with an idea that seemed almost absurd on its face. Superman, he suggested, should confront a thinly disguised version of the Ku Klux Klan.
The producers, searching for a compelling antagonist, agreed. The result was a sixteen episode storyline titled The Clan of the Fiery Cross, broadcast in June 1946. Each instalment reached millions of households at a time when radio was the dominant medium of mass entertainment.
Kennedy supplied background material, ensuring that the fictional group’s rituals and hierarchies closely mirrored those of the real Klan. Children listening across America heard Superman expose secret oaths, infiltrate meetings, and defeat the organisation not through brute force, but by revealing its cowardice and contradictions.
The effect was immediate. The Klan’s rituals were no longer secret. Its symbols were no longer intimidating. Children repeated its slogans in mocking tones. Leaders were forced to change passwords repeatedly, undermining trust and coherence within the organisation.
Decades later, Stephen J Dubner and Steven Levitt would famously describe the series as “the greatest single contributor to the weakening of the Ku Klux Klan” in Freakonomics, a claim they later moderated. Even so, there is no serious dispute that the broadcasts dealt a significant blow to the Klan’s self image.
What is certain is that the organisation loathed the exposure. Recruitment faltered. Meetings shrank. The Klan found itself stripped of the fear it depended upon and reduced to something far more dangerous to it than law enforcement alone: ridicule.
Financial pressure and official consequences
Kennedy’s information did more than entertain. By documenting how the Klan operated, he helped authorities demonstrate that the organisation was violating the terms of its non profit charter. In 1946, he wrote to Georgia governor Ellis Arnall outlining the legal grounds for revocation.
The result was a quo warranto suit, and in 1947 the Klan surrendered its national corporate charter in Georgia. Around the same time, the Internal Revenue Service pursued a tax lien of $685,000 dollars against the organisation, a serious blow to its finances.
Retaliation and exile
The backlash was swift and violent. Kennedy’s home was firebombed multiple times. Death threats became routine. Eventually, he fled to France, spending eight years abroad for his own safety. Even in exile, he continued to write and lecture, framing American segregation as part of a global struggle against authoritarianism.
He later returned to Florida, participating in civil rights sit ins during the 1960s and reporting on demonstrations led by Dr Martin Luther King Jr. The Klan never succeeded in silencing him.
Later life and legacy
Kennedy wrote or co wrote ten books over his lifetime, blending investigative journalism, folklore, and political analysis. He remained a prolific traveller, lecturer, and campaigner. Friends joked that he was married more times than he could recall accurately, a claim Kennedy encouraged with dry humour.
In 2007, St Johns County declared a Stetson Kennedy Day in his honour. His personal library was donated to the Civic Media Center in Gainesville, Florida, ensuring that future researchers could trace the threads of his work.
He died peacefully in 2011, aged 94. For someone who spent years immersed in violence and hatred, his end was notably calm.
Why Stetson Kennedy still matters
Kennedy’s story endures because it demonstrates an unusual truth. Power does not always collapse under force. Sometimes it unravels when its secrets are dragged into daylight and laughed at.
By combining meticulous documentation with an understanding of popular culture, Stetson Kennedy showed that exposing injustice could be as effective as confronting it directly. In an age still grappling with organised extremism, his methods remain instructive, and his example quietly radical.
