When Stetson Kennedy’s widow Sandra Parks celebrated her late husband’s 101st birthday, she sang “This Land is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie.
“He was a person that believed, ‘Let there be change, and let it begin with me,’” Parks said. “He believed that creating change was the highest calling that a person could aspire to.”
Kennedy, a famous Florida folklorist, human rights organizer and environmentalist, would have turned 101 years old today. Just one day before, on Wednesday from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., the Civic Media Center, located at 433 S. Main St., hosted a celebration of his life, and 30 friends and fans of Kennedy’s attended. Kennedy died in 2011, shortly before his 95th birthday.
Parks gave a powerpoint presentation about his life.
Kennedy started his civil rights activism career as a teenager when he fought anti-Semitism by encouraging his high school’s fraternities to accept Jewish students, Parks said. He attended UF but he dropped in 1937 out to join the Federal Writers' Project.
In 1944, he infiltrated the Georgia chapter of the Ku Klux Klan as “John Perkins” and exposed their secrets on a popular children's radio program called “The Adventures of Superman.”
Kennedy published 10 books on Southern slavery and civil rights.
Joe Courter, a co-founder of the Civic Media Center, said the center missed celebrating Kennedy’s 100th birthday. Kennedy and Parks donated more than 2,000 books to the Civic Media Center, Courter said.
“This year we wanted to make up for lost time and have Stetson Kennedy: 101, which is a great title for it cause for a lot of people they are just learning about who Kennedy is,” Courter said. “With the presentation Sandra put together, everybody learned something.”
