freakonomics

But within a few years, there were already signs of a massive revival. As wartime anxiety
gave way to postwar uncertainty, Klan membership flourished. Barely two months after
V-J Day, the Klan in Atlanta burned a 300-foot cross on the face of Stone Mountain, site
of a storied rock carving of Robert E. Lee. The extravagant cross burning, one Klansman
later said, was intended “just to let the niggers know the war is over and that the Klan is
back on the market.”
Atlanta had by now become Klan headquarters. The Klan held great sway with key
Georgia politicians, and its Georgia chapters included many policemen and sheriff’s
deputies. Yes, the Klan was a secret society, reveling in passwords and cloak-and-dagger
ploys, but its real power lay in the very public fear that it fostered—exemplified by the
open secret that the Ku Klux Klan and the law-enforcement establishment were brothers
in arms.
Atlanta—the Imperial City of the KKK’s Invisible Empire, in Klan jargon—was also
home to Stetson Kennedy, a thirty-year-old man with the bloodlines of a Klansman but a
temperament that ran opposite. He came from a prominent southern family whose
ancestors included two signers of the Declaration of Independence, an officer in the
Confederate Army, and John B. Stetson, founder of the famed hat company and the man
for whom Stetson University was named.
Stetson Kennedy grew up in a fourteen-room house in Jacksonville, Florida, the youngest
of five children. His uncle Brady was a Klansman. But he got his first real exposure to
the Klan when the family’s maid, Flo, who had pretty much raised Stetson, was tied to a
tree, beaten, and raped by a gang of Klansmen. Her offense: talking back to a white
trolley driver who had shortchanged her.
Because Kennedy couldn’t fight in World War II—he had had a bad back since
childhood—he felt compelled to defend his country at home. Its worst enemy, he
believed, was bigotry. Kennedy became a self-described “dissident at large,” writing antibigotry
articles and books. He became close friends with Woody Guthrie, Richard
Wright, and a host of other progressives; Jean-Paul Sartre published his work in France.
Writing did not come easily to Kennedy, or happily. He was at root a country boy who
would rather have been off fishing the swamps. But he was afflicted by a foolhardy
devotion to his cause. Kennedy would go on to become the only gentile member of the
Anti-Defamation League’s postwar effort to smite bigotry. (He coined the phrase “Frown
Power,” a centerpiece of the ADL’s peer-pressure campaign, which encouraged people to
pointedly frown when they heard bigoted speech.) He became the only white
correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier, the country’s largest black newspaper. (He
wrote a column about the race struggle in the South under the pseudonym Daddy
Mention—a black folk hero who, as myth told it, could outrun the blast of a sheriff’s
shotgun.)
What drove Kennedy was a hatred of small-mindedness, ignorance, obstructionism, and
intimidation—which, in his view, were displayed by no organization more proudly than