Peggy Bulger: I'm Peggy Bulger,
director of the American Folk Life Center here
at the Library of Congress.
And before we begin the program, I want to say that I'm really happy
to see so many visitors who came from so far away here at this event,
which is co-sponsored, actually, by Holland & Knight.
They provided the refreshments.
Yay. [applause] It always helps, you know?
The worst thing about a lunchtime program at the Library
of Congress is that you don't get lunch.
So it was great to have that.
And before we begin and I bring Stetson up,
I wanted to also recognize that this is a series of lectures
that we started at the American Folk Life Center about 18 months ago.
And they're called the Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series.
And Benjamin Botkin, as you know, was a pioneering folklorist,
and has a long history with the Library of Congress.
And we have in the audience today Dan Botkin,
Dr. Dan Botkin, who is his son.   [applause] And his wife, Diana.
And we're so happy to have you here.
They came down from New York for this.
And we also have many other board members,
but I'm going to really call up Stetson, if we would.
I wanted to say that I've known Stetson
Actually, I was the first state folklorist of Florida.
And being a young person, I thought that --
I kept running across these materials
that had been collected during the WPA in Florida
by a man named Stetson Kennedy who was, you know,
a contemporary of Zora Neale Hurston.
And being a young person, I thought he was long gone.
And this was back in 1975.
Anyway, somebody said, "No, Stetson Kennedy, he lives in Jacksonville,
and he's alive and well."
And he was not only alive and well, he's still alive and well,
and has continued to be an activist all of his life.
I'm not going to go through any of that, because he's going
to tell you a little bit himself.
But if you would, please welcome a remarkable,
remarkable man who's had an incredible life and is going
to hopefully share some of his thoughts with us today.
Stetson? [applause] Well.   Stetson Kennedy: Well, indeed.
Peggy Bulger: You told me that you really wanted to talk a little bit
about Benjamin Botkin, first of all.
You're probably, aside from Dan, one of the few people
who actually knew Ben, and talk about that.
Stetson Kennedy: Yes, well I know I was billed as going to speak
about building democracy in America,
but that's probably a pretty hot subject in Washington these days,
you know, in addition to our building democracy elsewhere.
I broached that subject at NPR yesterday, and they said, "No,
let's talk about Zora Hurston, or something else."
So we can talk about democracy in the question period, if you like.
And I didn't really know that I was going to be a part
of the Botkin series until just a few days ago.
But even so, I would like to take off on that subject.
It's something of a full circle for me.
I was just 20 years old, or younger, when I first crossed trails
with Dr. Benjamin Botkin.
I had been at Lee High School; you might know I'd go
to Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville.
And from there I went to the University of Florida,
and from then on down invented independent studies by dropping out.
[laughter] And I went on to Key West.
I shipped a trunkload of books to Key West by water.
It was cheaper that way.
And in my days and years early in Key West, I took it upon myself
to start collecting some of the idioms
from the Bahamian [unintelligible] and the Cuban cigar makers,
and of course the Afro and Anglo-Americans who were there
on the rock, as they called it.
And there were some fairly colorful things.
I recall one that said, "On days when the wind is walking right,
the water is crystal
as [unintelligible]," and things like that.
So, I made such a list and sent them --
at that point I signed on to the Writer's Project.
And I sent the list on to Dr. Botkin,
who was already National Director for Folklore here in Washington
for the WPA Writer's Project.
And he was sufficiently impressed to dub [spelled phonetically] me,
recommend that I be put in charge of folklore and oral history
and ethnic studies for the state of Florida at the age of 20.
And Zora Hurston came on board some 18 months later.
So I was wearing these three hats and nominally her boss,
but she was her own boss, of course,
and worked out of Eatonville, Florida.
And it's perhaps of interest that both Zora and I had
to take a pauper's oath in order to get those jobs.
A pauper's oath -- in case you've never taken one,
you have to solemnly swear that you have no money and no job
and no property and no prospect of getting any of those things.
So if you can do all that, you've got the job.
And I was eminently qualified.   No problem.
And Zora likewise.
Zora had -- at that point in 1938 when she joined,
she had already published her first two books.
And even so, she needed that job.   Royalties, as they called it,
consisted of 30 cents per copy a book; Hemingway, Hurston,
and later on -- that's what we got as our part
of each retail book sale, 30 cents.
And the salary involved that we were so anxious
to get was $37.50 every two weeks.
And in Zora's case, she only got $32.50 because someone
up here figured out that it was $5 cheaper to live in Eatonville,
Florida than it was Jacksonville, Florida.
So -- Peggy Bulger: They had locality pay at that time, I guess.
Stetson Kennedy: So Zora only got $32.50.
But even so, she was glad to get that.
I recall she was stationed in her home in Eatonville and I was
in the headquarters in Jacksonville, and our state director popped
out of her office one day -- had an editorial staff of some six
or eight people, and she looked around and said,
"Anybody heard from Zora?"
And no one had heard from Zora for some weeks.
So the director looked at me and said,
"You'd better write her a letter and jog her up."
So, I wrote her a letter and jogged her up.
And by return mail I received this thick manila envelope postmarked
Eatonville, Florida.
And as time went on I got to calling that the mark of Zora -- Eatonville.
But we were very anxious.
You know, word went around the office that a mark
of Zora package had arrived.
And we tore into it and passed it around, because it was
so full of such rich material.
We suspected that she'd probably collected it a year or so earlier,
and not while on payroll.
But we didn't care about things like that,
because it was so valuable to us.   And as one of the editors
of the Florida guide I would select the material and sprinkle it
around as seasoning in the WPA Florida guidebook
that Oxford University later published.
It reminds me that Zora, she was very good with idiom herself,
as well as having an ear for it.
And she once defined folklore as "the boiled down juice
or pot liquor of human living."   And I certainly agree.
I don't think anyone can improve upon that.
And I would take this pot liquor and sprinkle it all
through the guide for seasoning.
I'd like to hark back, though, to the name of Botkin.
As a teenager I had read his seminal monograph of [unintelligible] song;
I forget where it was published, one of the journals.
And in it he pointed out the integral relationship
between life and culture.
And it went on to advance such philosophical concepts
as "We collectors should not merely collect and take from people,
but have an obligation to give back to the people what we had taken."
He saw folklore as traveling a two-way street.
And Dr. Bulger here has certainly been a sterling example
of doing exactly that throughout her career.
And so many of the Humanities Council and so
on have done the same, as well as the archive of American folk life
as a whole has been very much involved in seeing to it
that the material is not like pheasant under glass and way back
in the archives, but as published and disseminated and utilized.
And I use the expression that the archives should be a seabed
for folk culture.
And I certainly hope that trend continues,
but I think Dr. Botkin deserves a lot of credit
for having promulgated it at the outset.
And of course, Alan Lomax was following in his footsteps,
and eventually organized his Association for Cultural Equity,
based in Manhattan at Columbia for a long time.
And Alan too was very much involved
in doing just what Dr. Botkin has recommended.
And in my own way -- Alan and I crossed trails during World War II.
He had a program going called
"Transatlantic Call," people to people.
And it was a CBS program.   Excuse me.
Peggy Bulger: That was when he was over in England,
doing that "Transatlantic Call," and you were in the States?
Stetson Kennedy: No, it was prior thereto.
Peggy Bulger: Prior?
Stetson Kennedy: He was operating, I believe, out of Washington.
And in any case, it was a CBS program, and each Sunday,
CBS would broadcast this program from American workers in some plant
about what they were doing to support the war effort.
And the following Sunday, a British factory staff would reciprocate.
And Alan called upon me to work with him as a consultant in Key West
and in Ybor City, Tampa and Tarpon Springs.
So that was my first working experience with Alan.
And in the course of -- well, let's see, my first book,
Palmetto Country -- it's out there on the table somewhere --
was a volume in the American Folkways series
with Erskine Caldwell as editor of the entire series.
And when Alan got a copy, I was gratified.
He said that he very much doubted that a better book
about Florida folk life would ever be written.
So of course I put that on the blurb, and it's still there.
[laughter] Alan passed his copy on to Woody Guthrie,
and the next thing I knew,
I received in the mail a Palmetto Country jacket from the book,
and Woody had written me a fan letter on the inside
of the jacket and mailed it to me.
And the jacket just turned up last year, a half century later.
Some woman in the Carolinas had the jacket, and I don't know how it got
out of my hands or into her hands.
[laughter] Anyway, it's back in the Guthrie archive in Manhattan now,
and I have copies in my place in Florida.
But that was a welcome homecoming.
And in that book jacket fan letter Woody said, "Don't be surprised
if I come staggering up to your door some day with my guitar,
and we'll have some good long talks," and so forth.
And in reality, he didn't actually come staggering up;
I received a phone call from the Greyhound bus station
in Jacksonville asking me to come get him.
[laughter] So I get there and Woody's sprawled
out on the sidewalk, sound asleep, with his head resting on his guitar,
the same guitar that he had written "This machine kills fascists."
And people, pedestrians are stepping over him, you know,
not knowing whether he's dead or drunk or just what was going on,
admiring the ability of this white man to sleep
on the sidewalk in broad daylight.
And I looked around and said, "Woody, where's your baggage?"
And he didn't answer me.
He just started unbuttoning, and he was wearing five shirts.
[laughter] So, that was Woody on the road.
I could go on and on about Woody.
We just recently discovered in the Guthrie archive --
I don't know how they overlooked it -- some 80 songs that he wrote there
at my place in Beluthahatchee, in the Spring of 1953.
I had just gone off to Europe, and so he was there
with Anik [spelled phonetically].   Woody was 41, and she was 21.
But she packed up from California and came there with him, and --
I don't know if I should tell this in polite company or not.
[laughter] When I returned eight years later, my Afro neighbors came
up and said, you know, "What kind of people was
that living there after you left?"   I said, "What do you mean?"
He said, "Well, me and Sandy drove up one Sunday morning to see
if it was alright if we went fishing.
And him and her come out buck naked.
What kind of people do you call that?"
I said, "That's just Woody Guthrie."
[laughter] Anyway, that sort of thing did happen.
I don't know whether the Guthrie Foundation appreciates my telling
that story or not.   Peggy Bulger: Stetson?
Stetson Kennedy: Hmm?
Peggy Bulger: When Woody lived on your land, there were several songs
that he wrote that actually now are being recorded for the first time
by Billy Bragg and Wilco, a young band now.
But one of those songs is called "Stetson Kennedy."
It's on the "Mermaid Two" album.
And can you tell us about the circumstances of that song?
Stetson Kennedy: I guess.
Actually, Woody wrote a total of four songs about me.
The first one was called "Beluthahatchee Bill."
I don't know where he found out my first name is William, actually.
And I didn't find out myself until I was a grown man
and received a birth certificate.   But anyway, Woody wrote this song,
"Beluthahatchee Bill," and never recorded it.
And it was all about me and [unintelligible] and so on.
And just recently, Rambling Jack Elliott,
his sidekick in their first days -- Jack was still a teenager,
and he just moved in with Woody Guthrie.
Bob Dylan didn't quite go that far, but Rambling Jack just moved in
and stayed, would not go away.
And whenever Woody came to Beluthahatchee,
Rambling Jack usually came with him.   And so that was one song.
Just recently Jack was revisiting me, like last year, and I asked him,
I said, "This 'Beluthahatchee Bill,' is it" --
no, I've got the wrong song.
I'll get back to "Beluthahatchee Bill."
In addition, in 1950 I took it upon myself to announce
as an independent write-in candidate for the United States Senate.
Claude Pepper had just lost the Democratic primarily election,
and George Smathers had won the primary.
And Smathers was talking about being such a good southern traditionalist,
by which he meant segregationist.
And I decided I would announce for the general election
as a colorblind candidate on the platform of total equality.
And that was 1950.
And it was sort of like putting my life on the line at that point.
So I asked Woody to write me some campaign songs.
And he wrote three of them.
I forget now whether I paid him $20 or nothing;
I don't know whether I have copyright to them or not.
But who does?
But anyway, the radio stations refused to broadcast them.
So I had to appeal to the Federal Communications Commission,
and of course they waited until 24 hours before the election
and ordered the Florida stations to broadcast.
So I ran out to the nearest juke joint to see what the reaction
of the good ole boys would be to Woody's songs.
And of course they almost fell off their stools when it got
around to total equality
and colorblind candidacy, things like that.
But I think your question was directed to the fact
that just recently, several years ago, Billy Bragg,
the British singer, took it upon himself to take some
of Woody's thousands of unsung songs and sing them.
And one of those he chose for his disc, "Mermaid Avenue II" was one
of those campaign songs, called "Stetson Kennedy."
What was one of the real Woody lines in that song?
Peggy Bulger: Stetson Kennedy, he's your man.
His -- Stetson Kennedy: I may not be the world's greatest something
or other, but when it comes to something I believe in,
I'm the world's loudest yeller.   And that was Woody's campaign song.
Peggy Bulger: Well, you know, Stetson,
you talk about putting your life on the line, but you've done
that many times in your life.
And probably the most spectacular is when you decided,
took it upon yourself to infiltrate the klavern in Stone Mountain,
Georgia and use folklore, actually, to revoke a charter there.
How did you ever decide to do that?
I know you were young and rash, but that was really, really rash.
Stetson Kennedy: Well, we're talking about World War II.
The Klan didn't wait for the war to end to come out from hiding.
And in some states they used front names.
In Virginia they called themselves the American Service Patrol,
and in Florida they called it Confederate Underground.
I became a Colonel in the Confederate Underground.
It only cost me $10.
[laughter] Peggy Bulger: You have that funny thing about StoryCorps
that you just said, about the three questions for the Klan?
Stetson Kennedy: Yes, the StoryCorps, what do they call them,
airstream vehicles parked out in front of the building here,
launching a nationwide tour to collect oral history.
I was struck by the fact that anyone can walk up and pay their $10
and tell their life story or interview their parents or whoever,
all for $10, no questions asked.
I wondered whether there would be any selectivity
at all, but apparently not.
It's wide open, which I consider to be a real democratization
of the history making and history recording process.
I think it's a real positive thing; I'll talk more about that
in a moment, if you will.
But your question had to do with the $10.
StoryCorps is going to charge $10.
And when I joined the Klan, the organizer had three questions.
He said, "Do you hate negroes?"   using the "n" word, of course.
He said, "Do you hate negroes?
Do you hate Jews?"   and, "Have you got 10 bucks?"
[laughter] So that's something the Klan and StoryCorps, you know --
in all other respects, they're opposites.
No, I intended to say something more about folklore in terms
of the Botkin and Lomax tradition of two-way street and cultural equity.
Beyond that, we have what I would consider to be the Woody Guthrie
and Pete Seeger school of protest, using folk idiom and folk culture
as a weapon or instrument for social protest and change.
And of course they didn't invent that idea.
Someone said to me right after 9/11 -- an African American friend said,
"You know, what's all this excitement about?
We Afro-Americans have never known anything
but terrorism since we were hatched."
And so that's of course something we all need to keep in mind
as we pursue this anti-terrorism thing.
We've got plenty of it going on in our own country,
both past, present and future.
But what was I going to say about that?
The protest lore actually originated --
it goes all the way back into the slave days,
and the slave folklore and their folk heroes.
Big John the Conqueror and later on John Henry,
all these people were protesting.
And in fact, protest was the only form that you could protest.
If it didn't rhyme and you didn't dance a jig, you were dead,
so that there's this vast body of protest lore created and put
to song for the most part.   And I was struck by the fact
that Zora Hurston sidestepped all of that.
She was hearing it because it was everywhere,
but she never turned much of that sort of thing in to the office
or to the Library here, of Congress.
So, taking note of that, I made it one of my specialties to --
and my other specialty was dirty songs.
I felt Botkin and Lomax
and all these people had already preempted the field
with John Henry and so on.
So I said, "Well, probably no one's done the dirty songs.
I'll make a name for myself with that."
So, I understand that you have it.
Some researcher told me it's in a cardboard box up here
in the National Archives, and the box is labeled "Omega."
So, I don't know if anyone can explain why the dirty songs got
labeled "Omega."   I don't know.
But anyway, it's up there.
Peggy Bulger: It might be "Delta," I think.
It was labeled "Delta."
Stetson Kennedy: If you can find out for me -- "Delta," not Omega.
"Delta." Peggy Bulger: And didn't you -- Stetson Kennedy: Why "Delta?"
Peggy Bulger: Well, think about the shape.
I don't know.
[laughter] Stetson Kennedy: That was before all these songs --
you couldn't sell them today to television and Hollywood.
They're not dirty enough.
Peggy Bulger: Didn't you collect "Uncle Bud"?
Wasn't that one of yours?
Stetson Kennedy: I've got a little story about
"Uncle Bud," involving Zora.
This is one of the few things I did as her boss.
It occurred to me that we could save a lot of gas money --
it was 19 cents a gallon back in 1938; that we could save all
that money by -- instead of running around the woods looking for Laura,
we'd just bring Zora up to Jacksonville and put her in a chair
and pick her brains for everything possible.
We figured she was carrying an awful lot of valuable stuff in her head.
So we did that, and in the course of the interviewing,
and pursuant to my focus on dirty songs, I said, "Zora,
you ever hear a song called 'Uncle Bud'?"
And she said, "Yes, I heard it."
And I said, "Do you know a song named 'Uncle Bud'?"
She said, "Yes, sir."
I said, "What kind of song would you call that?"
She said, "Well, that's one of those joke songs."
I said, "What do you mean, joke song?"
She said, "Well, a joke song is a song you wouldn't sing in front
of anybody but a joke woman."   So I said, "Well, you heard it?"
[laughter] And so she said, "Yes, I heard it."
So she proceeded to sing it,
and I'm not sure the Library has both an un-expurgated version
and a blurred one; at least the archive in Florida has done a bit
of editing on "Uncle Bud."
But I think that transition from the Botkin-Lomax school
to the Guthrie-Seeger school
of protest is something significant historically,
and the role which song has played and continues to play
in social change as a factor;
they're overthrowing the governments all the way
from the Philippines to Romania.
People were singing "We Shall Overcome," for example.
And I think these things are significant.
I recall seeing in one eastern European newspaper, they were trying
to write something about Woody.
And they spelled him V-U-D-I, Vudi, Gaffri, G-A-F-F-R-I.
Vudi Gaffri is as close as they could get to it.
Alan and I tried to get Woody to come overseas.
Alan was in London working with the BBC in the 1950s,
and at that time I was running all over Europe.
And we both tried to get Woody over,
but Woody was 200 percent American, focused on his country.
He wasn't all that interested.
Which reminds me, I wanted to say something
about this StoryCorps thing, how deeps those roots go; in my opinion,
all the way back to Whitman and Sandburg.
Sandburg's book, the people, the whole emphasis
in the Roosevelt New Deal back
in the mid-30s being on the American people.
In spite of the fact they were all falling over with hunger
and joblessness, there was this national focus on people.
And Roosevelt saw fit to bring into Washington, in my opinion --
and never before since have so many people of goodwill,
and caring people been put in Cabinet posts
and on the judge's bench to administer programs, departments.
Never before was such an assemblage in Washington.
But I recall Woody, one of the things he said recently.
At a Woody celebration I said,
"You know that there will never be a generation which will not need
to hear what Woody had to say."
And one of the things he said was that Pushkin and Whitman
and Sandburg were all saying the right thing,
but they weren't thinking the way his people thought,
and they weren't talking the way his people thought, so therefore,
he said, "I guess I'll just have to keep on trying to outpush Pushkin
and outwit Whitman and outsand Sandburg."
So that was Woody's way of looking
at this question of voice of the people.
Where were we?   Back in the Klan?
You were asking me about -- Peggy Bulger: Actually, yes.
You infiltrated the Klan, which was very --
well, either you could look at it as being very brave or very foolish.
I'm sure your mother would say you were very foolish.
But you were in the Klan, and I know
that you were undercover for many, many months.
But tell us, what did you do?
How did you get their charter revoked, and what happened
when you came out from undercover?
Stetson Kennedy: Well, that's a long story,
and I recommend my book to you.
[laughter] Peggy Bulger: I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan.
In a nutshell.
Stetson Kennedy: The whole story is out there on the table.
I don't know the short answer.
Peggy Bulger: Tell us about Superman and Drew Pearson.
Stetson Kennedy: Well, one of the first things that happened
at the first meeting -- I could see the police uniforms sticking
out from under the Klan robes, you know,
and the sheriff deputies' khaki uniforms.
And in attendance there was a judge and a prosecutor and all kinds
of politicians and public servants in Klan robes.
So I knew that my goal of getting hard,
actionable evidence could be taken into a court of law.
I couldn't go to the lawmen because so many of them were Klansmen.
So that was simply a dead end.
So I knocked on the door of the FBI in Atlanta,
and they showed little or no interest.
I might say this was the FBI of John Edgar Hoover in 1947.
And at that time the FBI had six African American employees
nationwide, and those six were chauffeurs here in Washington.
There were no black agents or other personnel.
But anyway, even then, before the liberation movement had really
begun, the FBI was, you know, taking no notes
about what I had to say about the Klan.
They said, "What do you know about these black militants?
So, at the very next Klan meeting the Grand Dragon gets up and says,
"Well, I had a little call from the FBI last week,
warning me that the Klan has been infiltrated,
and I'd better watch my step."
You can't ask for better cooperation than that.
So, that was the tie-in between the KKK and the FBI in 1947.
There was another stonewall; not just municipal and county
and state law, but the federal law was not interested.
In desperation, I tried to get the house
on Un-American Activities Committee to take an interest.
And Rankin of Mississippi was Chairman at the time, and he said,
"Oh, well the Klan is a patriotic organization.
They're just as American as apple pie."
So, all my efforts to get a hearing before the Un-American Activities
Committee about the Klan were in vain.
And eventually I took my large briefcase and stuffed it full
of evidence against the Klan; so much that I couldn't even close it.
It was sticking out of the briefcase.
And I came up to Washington and got in the back of a cab
and started putting on my Klan robe.
And the cab driver of course saw me in the mirror and we almost crashed,
and so I had to hurry up and explain to him what I was up to.
And he put me out at the House office building.
And I went in and knocked on the door of the American Committee,
and all the little ladies inside started screaming and running
out of the office, left me sitting there all by myself.
And eventually a man stuck his head through the door, and took one look
and slammed the door shut.
And I was just sitting there with a briefcase in my lap.
And finally they sent four Capitol police up here.
I was flattered that they sent four to take me into custody.
And they took me into the basement and I explained to them what I had
in mind, and they did not arrest me.
They just told me not to come back in a robe anymore.
[laughter] But all of that having happened,
then my first thought was the court of public opinion and the media,
and my first contact was with Drew Pierson here,
and he wrote the "Washington Merry-Go-Round" column,
which was the predecessor to Jack Anderson;
Anderson was his office boy back in the '40s.
Anyway, Pierson had a nationwide radio program.
So we broadcast every Sunday the minutes of the Klan's last meeting,
with the names of all these public servants and politicians
and businessmen and lawmen.
Peggy Bulger: And the password, the latest password.
Stetson Kennedy: Of course, none of those people ever showed up again,
and attendance generally hit rock bottom.
And best of all, violence came to a halt.
I think there's a moral in that for our current war
on international terrorism; that infiltration is one
of the effective ways we can go.
It's not easy, but -- the passwords came up after Pearson
and I went to the radio "Superman."
And they hired me as a consultant, and came up with a series called
"Superman versus The Grand Dragon."
And I would telephone the password signs and countersigns,
things like the sign would be "white"
and the countersign would be "man."
Or the sign would be "native" and the counter sign would be "born."
So I would phone this in to "Superman."
And so all the kids in America knew all the Klan passwords.
Just as fast as the Grand Dragon could think up new ones,
the kids would have them.
And the Grand Dragon went so far that one night he said,
"As soon as I adjourn, I might just as well go call 'Superman' myself
and collect that money myself."   I think it was like $10.
Peggy Bulger: Another $10?
Well, I think, Stetson, one of the things that amazed me
about your life and your work is that as that example shows,
you actually used folklore to make the world a better place,
to create political change and cultural change;
that folklore was not just something simple and cute and pretty,
but actually hit people where they live.
And you did that also with the labor movement?
Stetson Kennedy: Yeah, I couldn't help but be impressed,
even as a teenager, and when I first started collecting idiom,
I also collected what Botkin and others were calling "folk say" back
in those days; one-liners in which you sum
up an awful lot in a single sentence.
And we were very anxious to get as much of that as possible
and really distill collective wisdom, a real part of the legacy.
And off the cuff, I recall things like, "When you're in Rome, Georgia,
you've got to act like it."
And it seems to me that sort of thing summed up the Jim Crow system
in one line as well as any others I heard.
The former domestic servant, slave, said,
"I've fed white folks with a long spoon."
She was ironing when the sounds of the Yankee guns came over the hill,
and old Miss was sitting there rocking and knitting --
Ella, or whatever her name was, and she was ironing.
And she heard the Yankee guns coming, so she put down the iron.
And old Miss says, "You're not going to finish the ironing?"
And Ella says, "No, ma'am, I'm not going to finish the ironing."
And so old Miss says, "What are you going to do?"
And Ella says, "I'm going to practice my freedom by sitting
down whenever I feel like it."
[laughter] So that's folk say for you.
Zora did more, perhaps, than anyone else.
She was very taken with folk idiom, black English.
And she used it not only -- the [unintelligible],
the professional folklorists, frequently took exception
to the things that Zora did with the material she collected.
Instead of putting it into learned journals and scholarly treatises,
Zora made use of it in novels and plays and so forth.
And even in polemics she would resort to black English and idiom
on occasion when she was trying to make a point in a scholarly article.
And academia, some sectors of it, took exception
to that sort of use of it.
But needless to say, I approved, and I did as much of that in my book,
Palmetto Country, as I possibly could, and have continued,
as you say, ever since, to try to put it to good use.
Peggy Bulger: Well, we could --
I mean, we've just really literally scratched the surface.
But I wanted to have some time for people in the audience
to have a chance to ask questions.
And just to let you know -- I mean, literally, Stetson has just talked
about one little part of his life.
I remember one time in the '80s when I came to visit you,
you'd chained yourself to a tree
because they were going to widen the road.
Environmental causes were very much a part of your life.
Do you remember that, when you chained yourself
to the live oak tree?
Stetson Kennedy: It was a large live oak, and it's still there.
Peggy Bulger: It's still there?
[applause] Stetson Kennedy: Don't laugh, because I was in one
of your local institutions yesterday and he's showing me the Capitol,
what a beautiful view he had.
He said, "I'm thinking of cutting down that oak tree
so I can see the whole thing."   So you may have a problem.
It's not all over.
Peggy Bulger: We have -- Thea is holding a microphone back there.
Does anyone have a question for Stetson about folklore,
about his work with the WPA, the Klan?
Here's one, over here.
Female Speaker: I was in Florida several years ago, in St. Augustine,
and during that visit a friend shared with me a 1904 postcard
that had a picture of a Seminole Indian.
And the picture fascinated me because this was a picture
of a sub-Saharan African woman -- that's how she appeared --
dressed in Indian regalia.
So, I'm curious, did you interview any Indians during your folklore?
Any projects involving Indians in your studies, or anything like that?
Stetson Kennedy: I missed some of it.
Peggy Bulger: During the course of your folklore collecting,
did you ever interview any of the Native Americans; the Seminoles
or the Miccosukees in Florida?   Any of those?
Stetson Kennedy: Well, it's a bit of a long story, but it's a good one.
Good question.
In Florida, we had -- I suppose you could call it the good sense --
when we came to recording the ex-slave interviews, we had a quota.
We had a staff of 200 slots statewide.
And eight of those 200 slots were supposed to go to Afro-Floridians.
And in practice, usually there were not more than six.
And they were always the first to be fired whenever Congress put in cuts.
But even so, we took those six and used them
to do the ex-slave interviews, so we had a black-on-black situation.
And as a result, you historians in the audience have said
that the Florida ex-slave interviews were more substantive than those
in other states where they used white on black; they used whites
to interview and try to get the nitty-gritty
out of the former slaves.
Speaking of nitty-gritty, I recall there was one former slave
who was known as Mama Duck near Tampa.
And when I asked about, you know, talking about slavery, she said,
"Well, I prayed and got all the malice out of my soul,
so I ain't going to tell no lies for them or on them."
And I thought that was about as good as any piece of folklore, to say,
you know, that you can't find a better definition of objectivity
than that; not going to tell no lies for them or on them.
But you ask about the Indians, the Native Americans.
Some Yankee Indian, I think Oswego, some northern tribe,
walked into our office in Jacksonville one day.
And he was a graduate of an Ivy league,
one of the Ivy league schools, had a PhD.
But he wanted one of those $37 jobs.   And that's the Depression for you.
And it occurred to me, I said, "Well, possibly our Seminoles
down in the glades will tell this Yankee Indian things they won't
tell us."
And so I sent him into the Everglades,
and I don't think we ever heard from him again.
[laughter] But the principle was there.
We tried to use -- whenever we were going into a particular culture,
ethnic culture, we would try to find, you know,
someone from that culture to do the interviewing.
And that, I think, was, you know, a commendable thing;
not only back then, but forever.
A fellow named George Stoney back in '45 and '46, I think,
pioneered in documentary film.
He did one about a black midwife called "All My Children."
And it continues to be the classic prototype of the documentary film.
And a bit later on, George Stoney, I had the privilege to work
with him there in Georgia, and he's since been doing this thing
around the world, adopted a technique of --
instead of making the documentary, put the equipment,
the cameras in the hands of the Native Americans or labor union
or whatever particular group, and teaching them how
to use the equipment and says, "Okay,
you go write your own history, and write it and film it
and direct it, and I'll watch."
So, this technique he's taken around the world,
and it had a very good effect in terms
of documenting people's cultures.
I was reminded, a fellow named Alan Burns, an anthropologist
at the University of Florida -- the same principle,
working with the [unintelligible]-speaking Indians
in Mexico.
They chose someone from the tribe and put him
through anthropology school at the University of Mexico.
And he went back to his people with computers and decided
that the [unintelligible] alphabet wasn't
up to the [unintelligible] language, so he created some new characters
for the computer keyboard.
But Burns tells me that the result has been probably the world's most
exhaustive study of any ethnic group on the planet.
So this is an idea worth, I think, clinging to.
Peggy Bulger: Anyone else?
We don't have too much time left, but I wanted to ask you, Stetson.
Now, you have to realize, Stetson,
you were 21 when you got your job with the WPA, right?
So that's why you're still so young.   You were 21.
You were a young guy.
But after -- Stetson Kennedy: I'm sorry I lived so long.
Some of the things going on out there and around here, you know,
I have my regrets; I would rather have gone
to my grave without seeing it.   I've been seeing, actually, a few --
run into a good trend called [unintelligible].
[laughter] Peggy Bulger: I wanted
to have you tell these folks just a smidgen.
You were in the WPA, then you infiltrated the Klan.
You worked with Myles Horton up at the Highlander Center.
You've worked with Virginia and Clifford Durr; I mean,
everybody who's anybody pretty much here in the United States.
But then you went over to Europe.
And you ended up having to live in the Paris police station for a year.
Can you tell us about that?
Stetson Kennedy: Well, you know, when I went to Europe in 1952
to testify before the United Nations about forced labor
in this country -- and that's a long story but --
I had hoped to get away from my Klan nightmares; you know,
the Klan catching up with me.
So I said, "When I get to Europe, it will all be gone."
But I get to Paris, where it rains quite often,
and there were the French traffic cops all wearing white rubber
raincoats with white capes, just like the Klan,
and making all the traffic signals just --
[laughter] So the nightmare went right on like that.
But in Paris I spent most of my time with Richard Wright,
and Richard was astounded.
I don't know that he had ever met a white American southerner
who thought and felt everything exactly the way he did.
So we were the best of buddies and spent all our days in Caf Tourno.
And Richard said a number of things that are probably worth passing on,
such as, "You know, it took me five years of getting lost
in the greatness of Paris before I could stop thinking
and seeing everything in black and white."
Five years in the greatness of Paris.
And on one occasion he said, "I got sufficiently homesick.
I got back as far as the Canadian border, but then I looked
across the line and I just couldn't cross it.
Got back on the plane and went back to Paris."
So I think that's a commentary on us.
Here's a native son, native born black boy,
homesick, and couldn't face it.
Peggy Bulger: But you ended up in the police station.
Why was that?
Stetson Kennedy: I'm still not absolutely certain.
Peggy Bulger: I think you didn't have a passport.
Stetson Kennedy: I was persona non grata.
Every time I crossed the national border in Europe, it seemed I was
under house arrest no matter which side of the curtain I was on.
I was suspect.   And I guess that's a compliment.
I take it to be a compliment.
Anyway, they considered me a threat of some sort, east and west.
In France they knocked on my door.
They always arrest you at 2:00 a.m. So they knocked on the door
and threw me into a camion with Algerian, I guess, freedom fighters.
And they took me off to the Interior Ministry holding pen
and gave me a 24-hour expulsion notice.
And they had a rubber stamp, and it says under reason,
"presence in France undesirable."
That was the reason for my expulsion.
But Le Monde, a newspaper, got hold of it and reported it, "Kennedy,
correspondent for the great black American newspaper The Pittsburgh
Courier, has been ordered to quit the country,"
and asking the question of, since when is the lack
of a passport been grounds for expulsion in France,
and is this truly a French initiative,
or is it at the behest of the American Embassy?
And -- I got ahead of myself.   It was not Le Monde who asked that.
An Afro-Senator from Senegal in Paris,
reading the Le Monde notice -- the French have an institution,
I would commend it to our Congress here.
Any Senator could write a written question to the executive branch,
and the executive branch had to reply in writing within 24 hours.
So it's probably an institution we could use to our advantage.
But anyway, this Senator from Senegal assumed that I was black,
writing for The Pittsburgh Courier, and put a written question
to the French government: "Since when is it grounds for expulsion?"
and raised the question whether it was a French initiative
or an American Embassy request.   But they kept me there.
Every day I would report.
I would go home at night, and each morning I would go back
to police headquarters, to the detention room,
and they would keep me sitting in the room all day.
And at the end of the day they would hand me another 24-hour
expulsion notice.   I was refusing to leave.
And that went on for over a year, and eventually they had a shelf
in the office, and a little note on the shelf saying, "Don't scribble
on the buffet," or whatever they called it.
And I not only scribbled,
but I brought my book, the Klan manuscript.
I was working on it.
So I'd bring it to the police headquarters,
and I finished writing it there at police headquarters.
And eventually word got out to the officers that I had been employed
by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in some
of my Klan work, so they came to regard me as a fellow police agent.
And then we were very buddy-buddy, and they would say,
"We understand your position, and it's just the Interior Ministry
that doesn't know what it's doing," and so on.
And so they ended up serializing my Klan book in their police gazette.
[laughter] Peggy Bulger: Unfortunately we've run out of time
for the conversation, because we want to have time
for people to get books signed.
Stetson, I think you have four of your books out there, three or four;
I know I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan, The Klan Unmasked,
After Appomattox, Palmetto Country.
And so Stetson will be out signing books, if anyone is inclined.
Female Speaker: He's actually signing them here.
Peggy Bulger: Oh, he's going to sign them here?
Okay, you can buy your books and bring them
up here, which is even better.   That means you get to relax.
They'll bring you some more water.
But if you would, please join me in thanking Stetson for being here.