Tag Archives: Stetson Kennedy

The Urban Legend(s) of “Barefoot Bill”

Posted on March 9, 2023 | Leave a comment

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“Barefoot Bill” seemed to be everywhere in Jacksonville at once, a phantom menace, a “burglar bugaboo,” pilfering bedrooms of prominent citizens as they ate dinner downstairs. Whether or not he ever existed, Bill made headlines from the 19-aughts to the 1930s and as far away as South Carolina. Maybe he’s out there still.

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Tagged "high murder rate in the South, A.J. Hedrick, Barefoot Bill, blackface, Calvin Oak, Daddy Mention, Daddy Mention Polk County, G.T. Gato, John Henry, John N.C. Stockton, Jose Huau, Judge W.H. Baker, murder rate Jacksonville, Old Folks at Home, Stagga Lee, Stagger Lee, Stagolee, Stephen Foster, Stetson Kennedy, T. Frederick Davis, Vaudeville, W.H. Baker, Way Down Upon the Swanee River, Zora Neale Hurston

Confederate Park’s “In Memory of our Women of the Southland”

Posted on March 25, 2018 | 1 comment

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She’s the embodiment of a Romantic concept called the Lost Cause. Her rhetorical strength, as an object of art, is that to stand before her and deny the Lost Cause lie is to look her in her loving and noble face and call her a liar before her tender children.

Unfortunately, for the Lost Cause Romantics, history documents the originating words of the Confederates.

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Tagged Alexander Stephens, Allen George Newman, Birth of a Nation, Confederate Park, Confederate Veteran, Eartha White, Jim Crow, Ku Klux Klan, Lost Cause, NAACP, Ocoee Massacre, Reconstruction, Redemption, Stetson Kennedy, Triumph of Peace, Zip Coon

Beluthahatchee–land of activism and art

Posted on August 27, 2017 | Leave a comment

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“Florida is my birthplace,” Kennedy writes in The Klan Unmasked, “and I am attached to it. I did not want to give the Klan the satisfaction of forcing me to abandon Beluthahatchee.”

When Kennedy drove up to the bus station in Jacksonville to pick him up, all he saw was a bum with a guitar case. When he asked Guthrie where the rest of his belongings were, the singer-poet said, “I’m wearin’ ’em.”

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Tagged Arlo Guthrie, Beluthahatchee, Chip Southworth, Karen Roumillat, Klan Unmasked, Ku Klux Klan, osprey, Sartre, Stetson Kennedy, Woody Guthrie

The Klan in Jax Politics, Story no. 6

Posted on June 8, 2017 | 1 comment

Click below for the sixth story in a series of seven about the KKK in Jacksonville. On June 13th, come to Coniferous Cafe in downtown Jax at 7 pm, to hear Tim Gilmore’s talk “The Klan in Jax: Its Repugnant Rise and Hysterical Collapse.

Confederate generals like Nathan Bedford Forrest formed the KKK in Tennessee in the wake of the Civil War in 1866. A prominent Jacksonville attorney and Klansman had dubbed himself Nathan II in 1950.

Jacksonville would name another prominent bridge after Governor Fuller Warren, former Jacksonville City Councilman and Klansman. In 1949, Warren called the Klan “covered cowards and sheeted jerks,” but only after Jax Klansman and Baptist preacher A.C. Shuler outed Warren in a sermon as a Kluxer.

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Tagged A.C. Shuler, Alexander Stephens, Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, Association of Carolina Klans, Axe Handle Saturday, Bill Hendrix, Canter Brown Jr., Carver Village, Claire Goforth, Confederacy, Cornerstone Speech, David Lawrence, Donald Trump, Edgar Waybright, Florida Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Fuller Warren, Fuller Warren Bridge, Gutzon Borglum, Harry T. Moore, Haydon Burns, Heritage Not Hate, I.D. Hart, Imperial City, Isaiah David Hart, Jacksonville, jaxpsychogeo, John Kasper, John Mathews, KKK, Klan, Klan Act, Ku Klux Klan, Loyal White Knights, Mathews Bridge, NAACP, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Nathan II, Original Southern Klans, Ossian Hart, Richard Spencer, Robert Lee “Wild Bill” Davidson, Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Southern Poverty Law Center, Stet, Stetson Kennedy, Stone Mountain, The Klan Unmasked, Tim Gilmore, Tom Hamilton, United Daughters of the Confederacy, unmasking, White Primary Bill

Klan in Jax, Part 3/7: J.B. Stoner’s Defense of the Klan

Posted on June 5, 2017 | Leave a comment

Click below for the third story in a series of seven about the KKK in Jacksonville. On June 13th, come to Coniferous Cafe in downtown Jax at 7 pm, to hear Tim Gilmore’s talk “The Klan in Jax: Its Repugnant Rise and Hysterical Collapse.

J.B. Stoner’s defense of the Klan in the case of bombing six year old Donal Godfrey’s house in Jacksonville was apt, for Stoner was no stranger to bombs. In 1980, he’d finally be convicted of bombing Birmingham’s Bethel Baptist Church in 1958.

He also served as defense attorney for the Klan after mass violence in St. Augustine.

Later he became the defense attorney for James Early Ray, the murderer of Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Tagged Al Letson, Ancient City Hunting Club, Andrew Young, Bombingham, Byron De La Beckwith, Donal Godfrey, Edward Kallal, Imeson Airport, J.B. Stoner, Jacksonville, James Brock, James Earl Ray, KKK, Ku Klux Klan, Lincolnville, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Monson Motor Lodge, Ralph Abernathy, Richard Spencer, Robert Hayling, Rudyard Kipling, St. Augustine, St. Augustine Movement, Stetson Kennedy, The Klan Unmasked, White Man's Burden

When the Klan bombed a six year old’s home

Posted on June 4, 2017 | Leave a comment

Click below for the second story in a series of seven about the KKK in Jacksonville. On June 13th, come to Coniferous Cafe in downtown Jax at 7 pm, to hear Tim Gilmore’s talk “The Klan in Jax: Its Repugnant Rise and Hysterical Collapse.

Fifty-three years later, Donal Godfrey tells me from his home in Monrovia, Liberia, that if the family had been on the side of the house where the bomb detonated deep in the night, they’d be dead.

“It blew the refrigerator through the roof,” he says. “Not too many people have survived a Klan bombing. It’s an exclusive club.”

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Tagged Burton H. Griffin, Donal Godfrey, Donald Eugene Spegal, J.B. Stoner, Jacky D. Harden, James Earl Ray, KKK, Klan bombing, Ku Klux Klan, Lackawanna Elementary, Martin Luther King, NAACP, Robert Pittman Gentry, Stetson Kennedy, The Klan Unmasked, William Rosecrans, Willie Eugene Wilson

The Klan in Jax: the first story of seven

Posted on June 3, 2017 | Leave a comment

Click below for the first story in a series of seven about the KKK in Jacksonville. On June 13th, come to Coniferous Cafe in downtown Jax at 7 pm, to hear Tim Gilmore’s talk “The Klan in Jax: Its Repugnant Rise and Hysterical Collapse.

In the 1920s, when Stetson Kennedy saw his first Klan parade on Jacksonville’s Main Street and Willie Chappell saw the victims of lynchings hanging in the trees off Edgewood Avenue near New Kings Road, the Klan was at its zenith.

Eartha White, the NAACP, and affiliated activists compared notes and estimated that between 3,000 and 4,000 black voters had been terrorized from or outright denied the chance to vote in Duval County’s first post-19^th-Amendment election.

Reverend A.C. Shuler, pastor of Jacksonville’s former Calvary Baptist Church, predicted the Klan would pick the next American president. Shuler outed Florida Governor Fuller Warren, former Jacksonville city councilman, as a former Klansman in a sermon.

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Tagged 19th amendment, A.C. Shuler, Eartha White, Fuller Warren, Imeson Airport, Jacksonville, jaxpsychogeo, July Perry, KKK, Ku Klux Klan, Linda Sparks, NAACP, NAAWP, National Associate for the Advancement of Colored People, National Association for the Advancement of White People, Ocoee Massacre, Original Southern Klans, Paul Ortiz, Stetson Kennedy, Stone Mountain, Susan Lamb, The Klan Unmasked, Tim Gilmore, Willie Chappell