How Superman defeated the KKK | Little White Lies

How Super­man defeat­ed the KKK

15 Jan 2017

Words by Adam Woodward

Abstract image with pink arrow and various geometric shapes in black and white.
Abstract image with pink arrow and various geometric shapes in black and white.
The incred­i­ble true sto­ry of a hero with a secret iden­ti­ty who bat­tled a gang of masked villains.

In a glade cast­ing weird shad­ows over the near­by hills and light­ing the sky above burns a huge wood­en cross. Before it kneel half a hun­dred men clothed in long robes. Point­ed hoods slit only at the eyes cov­er their heads and faces, and a low gut­tur­al chant issues harsh­ly from their hid­den lips…”

This evoca­tive image was beamed into the minds of mil­lions of young Amer­i­cans on the evening of 11 June 1946. It was a night that a hero on an endur­ing quest for truth, jus­tice and the Amer­i­can way” struck a telling blow against a secret army of masked vil­lains. This was the sum­mer that Super­man defeat­ed the Ku Klux Klan. But the Man of Steel isn’t the real hero of this story.

By the mid-’40s, Klan mem­ber­ship was in freefall. Lynch­ings and pub­lic demon­stra­tions had become increas­ing­ly rare occur­rences, but hard­line seg­re­ga­tion and hate speech remained a fright­en­ing real­i­ty for non-white res­i­dents across the South­ern States. Stet­son Kennedy grew up in the South and always hat­ed the KKK. He began a cru­sade against what he called home­grown racial ter­ror­ists” dur­ing World War Two after a back injury pre­vent­ed him from fight­ing Fas­cism on the front­line. As a jour­nal­ist, Kennedy exposed numer­ous cas­es of social prej­u­dice in his native Flori­da, infil­trat­ing white suprema­cist groups and leak­ing infor­ma­tion to the police and press. Top of his hit list was still the Ku Klux Klan. It occurred to me that some­one need­ed to do a num­ber on them,” recalled Kennedy in a 2005 inter­view. After the end of the war, he decid­ed that some­one was him.

Pos­ing as an ency­clopae­dia sales­man and adopt­ing the name of a deceased uncle who had him­self been a Klan mem­ber, Kennedy start­ed fre­quent­ing guys who had, he wrote, the frus­trat­ed cru­el look of the Klan to them.” He played a lot of pool and drank a lot of beer, until final­ly he was invit­ed into a Geor­gia fra­ter­ni­ty head­ed by for­mer Impe­r­i­al Wiz­ard of the Ku Klux Klan, Dr Samuel Green.

Don­ning the infa­mous white robe, Kennedy start­ed attend­ing week­ly meet­ings where he learned the Klan’s pass­words and secret names. Which turned out to fol­low an embar­rass­ing­ly sim­ple pat­tern: they would sim­ply add the let­ters KL’ to the front of words. The meet­ing place was called the klav­ern. Two Klans­men would hold a klon­ver­sa­tion. He learned the Klan hand­shake, in which you would limply grip left hands and wig­gle them a few times. He learned that they charged you $15 for a uni­form, which was real­ly just a sheet with a hood. Deter­mined to demys­ti­fy the Klan and under­mine their vast net­work of Klea­gles (recruit­ment offi­cers), Kennedy took exten­sive notes of their close­ly guard­ed rit­u­als and planned acts of vio­lence. Snatch­ing evi­dence from the wastepa­per bas­ket of the Grand Drag­on – anoth­er lead­ing Klan offi­cial – he helped the Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice hit the Klan with a $685,000 out­stand­ing tax bill.

But fear­ing the Klan’s con­nec­tions to the gov­ern­ment and law enforce­ment agen­cies, Kennedy need­ed a more cre­ative way to unmask them. Walk­ing down the street one day, he saw some kids play­ing cops and rob­bers. They were exchang­ing secret pass­words, just like the Klan did at their meet­ings. Sud­den­ly, the idea hit him like a loco­mo­tive. The biggest hero in the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion was Super­man. Not just in com­ic books but in The Adven­tures of Super­man’, a huge­ly pop­u­lar radio show that was broad­cast every night. What if Kal-El could take on the Klan? Look­ing for fresh ideas and new vil­lains to boost rat­ings, the radio show’s writ­ers agreed to meet with Kennedy after he con­tact­ed them with a sen­sa­tion­al sto­ry­line. The result was a 16-part mini-series enti­tled Clan of the Fiery Cross’, a thrilling tale of base­ball and big­otry that used real Klan secrets leaked by Kennedy to expose and ridicule their rituals.

At the first KKK meet­ing after the show aired, the cloaked atten­dees lost their rags. I came home from work the oth­er night and my kid and all these oth­er kids had these tow­els tied around their necks like capes,” exclaimed one dis­mayed mem­ber. Some of them had pil­low cas­es over their heads and the ones with the capes were chas­ing the ones with pil­low cas­es. When I asked them what they were doing,they said they were play­ing this new game of cops and rob­bers called Super­man Against The Klan’. I nev­er felt so ridicu­lous in all my life. Sup­pose my own kid finds my Klan robe?’” Pret­ty klembarrassing.

The biggest hero in the public imagination was Superman. But what if Kal-El could take on the Klan?

By 1946, with Kennedy con­tin­u­ing to feed the Klan’s secret codes and plans to some 4.5 mil­lion lis­ten­ers, the show’s huge pop­u­lar­i­ty had all but crushed the Klan’s prospects in Amer­i­ca. At the cli­max to four weeks of Superman’s tri­umphant bat­tles against the hate­ful forces of the Grand Drag­on, it’s revealed that the Klan is real­ly just a mon­ey­mak­ing scheme to get suck­ers to buy robes. Kennedy became Klen­e­my No 1, with real-life Klan leader Samuel Green offer­ing a reward for his cap­ture: Kennedy’s ass is worth $1,000 a pound!” Despite the best efforts of the Klan to dis­cov­er their mole, Kennedy escaped detec­tion until 1951 when he blew his cov­er by tes­ti­fy­ing against the Klan before a fed­er­al grand jury inves­ti­gat­ing bomb attacks aimed at black, Catholic and Jew­ish centres.

He remained scared non­stop, to date,” reveal­ing the shoot­ing of his dog and fre­quent attempts to torch his home, but capped his coura­geous exploits with a book called I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan’ (lat­er renamed The Klan Unmasked’), which revealed the odi­ous machi­na­tions of the KKK from the per­spec­tive of a hard­boiled under­cov­er detec­tive. There were those who won­dered whether Kennedy had embell­ished his achieve­ments – he acknowl­edged some of the mate­r­i­al came from anoth­er unnamed man who also infil­trat­ed the Klan – but Freako­nom­ics’ authors Stephen J Dub­n­er and Steven Levitt even­tu­al­ly hailed him, the great­est sin­gle con­trib­u­tor to the weak­en­ing of the Ku Klux Klan.”

A descen­dant of the mak­er of the cow­boy hat, Stet­son Kennedy’s lin­eage can be traced right back to two sign­ers of the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence and his cru­sade against back­yard ter­ror­ism became a life’s work. He worked with giants of the 20th cen­tu­ry includ­ing Simone de Beau­voir and Woody Guthrie. If the Bush broth­ers real­ly think that women and minori­ties are get­ting pref­er­en­tial treat­ment,” Kennedy remarked in 2004, they should get them­selves a sex change, paint them­selves black and check it out.” He authored 10 books, mar­ried sev­en times and was still march­ing for farm­work­ers’ rights in the 10th decade of his life. In hos­pice care a few months before his death at the age of 94, a doc­tor checked his men­tal facil­i­ties: Where are you from?” asked his physi­cian. Kennedy replied, Plan­et Earth.”

Bat­man V Super­man: Dawn of Jus­tice is released 25 March.

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