Kennedy also has an unusual distinction of Woody Guthrie having written a song praising him and his work, interpreted here by Billy Bragg (Stetson Kennedy 06/08/2015):
Grimes cites a verse not included in the Billy Bragg version here:
Mr. Kennedy pursued the Klan and racist politicians through a variety of means. In 1950 he ran a write-in campaign for senator. Woody Guthrie, who lived on Mr. Kennedy’s lakeside property near Jacksonville, writing 88 songs there, composed a campaign song for him, titled “Stetson Kennedy,” declaring:One of Kennedy's books was Southern Exposure (1946) about Southern politics of the era. This was published the year after the Second World War, in which official US war aims and war propaganda stressed the superiority of American democracy and equality over the kind of dictatorship and racism represented by the Nazis.
Stetson Kennedy, he’s that man;
Walks and talks across our land;
Talkin’ out against the Ku Klux Klan.
For every fiery cross and note;
I’ll get Kennedy a hundred votes.
He included this table illustrated the results of a poll done by Negro Digest in 1945 on the question of "Are all men reated equal?" He notes that the respondents included a 10:1 ratio of white respondents.
He calls attention to the dramatic "extent to which presjudice obtains throughout the nation." But he also stresses the other obvious result of this poll. "The fact that 61 per cent of the Southern respondents agreed that all men are created equal, and then only 4 per cent would admit that Negroes are equal to whites, is just one indication of the insanity produced by the Myth of the Master Race."
No doubt a point well taken! But I also can never resist thinking about alternative poll interpretations. In this case, if the Southern respondents were 10:1 white, i.e., 9% non-white and mostly African-American in the South, that means that something like half of the Southern black respondents declined to say that blacks were equal to whites. Which calls attention to the questions themselves. The first question "Are all men reated equal?" uses the wording of the US Declaration of Independence, which most Americans in the last year of the Second World War would have been inclined to reflexively affirm.
On the other hand, the percentages who affirm even that phrase with its patriotic and all-American connotations was 82% in the West, 79% in the North, and 61% in the South. So a fifth or more of the respondents nationwide were unwilling to endorse even a throwaway patriotic truism like that. And in the South, over a third of them.
But the second question isn't structured in a parallel way, i.e., it doesn't ask, "Are Negroes created equal to whites?" Insted, it asks a more factual question without the patriotic aura of the Declaration, "Are Negroes equal to whites?" The 92% Southern response of "No" was factually accurate! And about a two-thirds majority in the North and West answered the same way.
But Kennedy is right in calling attention to the disparity between the professed American and democratic ideal of equality and the perceived reality as shown in the polling results.
This is significant in light of what I called attention to in yesterday's "heritage" post, Kenneth Stampp's stressing the importance of the 14th and 15th Amendments as both law and official ideals, even when their effect was widely nullified under segregation and Jim Crow.
Kennedy goes on in the same chapter to challenge the American reality with the American ideals, specifically with the professed American values of the Second World War. James Whitman has a recent book called Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017). But Kennedy was also writing in 1946:
It has been generally supposed that Nazi Germany sank lower than any other nation in giving official sanction to the Myth of the Master Race, but in reality the myth enjoys its greatest legal status in the United States of America. While the Nazis adopted all manner of legal restrictions against the economic, political, and civil rights of Jews (more or less rigorous than the South's restrictions on Negroes), they did not go so far as to prohibit intermarriage between Nordic Germans and Jews. On the other hand, thirty states of the United States (including all Southern states) have statutes which provide that "All marriages between white persons and persons of Negro descent are forever prohibited and shall be void always." As an added precaution, Arkansas proceeds to state that concubinage between whites and Negroes is likewise verboten. Florida, displaying a nice regard for the double standard, provides a $1,000 fine and three months' imprisonment for any white woman who has sexual intercourse with a Negro man, but makes no reference to such relations between white men and Negro women. [my emphasis]Which reminds me, the general equality question in the poll cited above used the generic Declaration language about all men being created equal. It would be interesting to know how the respondents would have answered a question about gender equality in that poll.
He continues with the German comparisons:
In defining racial purity many American states also go further than did the Nazis. The infamous Nazi Laws of Niirnberg permitted cultural and spiritual "Nordification" of Germans with one Jewish grandparent, but the only hope for a child born of an Aryan German mother and a Jewish father was for the mother to formally swear that the child was not the issue of her Jewish husband, but of an adulterous liaison with an Aryan. The Nazi Civil Service Law of 1933 prescribed that no German could be considered a bona fide Aryan if he had more than one eighth Jewish blood (more than one Jewish great-grandparent).Those citations are also reminders of how race in America - and everywhere else - is very much a social construction.
But the Laws of Nürnberg had nothing on the laws of some American states. Long before the Nazis adopted the same formula in defiance of all the laws of biology, South Carolina and Maryland defined colored persons as "Any person possessing one eighth or more Negro blood." However, South Carolina went on to provide that children of mixed parentage having less than one eighth Negro blood are entitled to the rights of whites; but if full-blooded whites object to their attending white schools, the state is obligated to provide them separate schools, neither white nor colored.
Florida imposes the Jim Crow line against all persons having as much as one sixteenth Negro blood. Arkansas and Virginia have preferred to vest discretionary power in the duly delegated (white ) officials via the definition: "Any person having any ascertainable Negro blood." In Texas and Tennessee, Negro blood does not have to be either ascertainable or in any specific proportion, as the laws read: "Any person of mixed blood descended from a Negro." Georgia - all-out for white supremacy - includes among "colored persons": "Any person having Negro, West Indian, Asiatic, or Indian blood, and all descendants." [my emphasis]
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