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Stetson Kennedy was born in 1916 into a family of Florida's old high society. His grandfather had served as an officer in the Confederate Army & his mother was a leading member of the Daughters of the Confederacy. What also stuck with him in his youth was the racism prevalent in all walks of Southern life. His family had a beloved black maid named Ellie who was the target of vicious slurs by white youths often in Kennedy's presence. This made an lasting impression on him. Kennedy was unable to enlist in the military to serve in World War II because of a bad back, so he decided to channel his patriotism towards combatting racial injustices in the Jim Crow South. He is best known for infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan and exposing their secrets. Working with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Kennedy joined the Klan and multiple Klan-affiliated organizations under the name of his dead uncle - a man who ironically was a proud and loyal Ku Klux Klan member before his death. Kennedy wanted to gather evidence which could be used to prosecute members of the Klan. His participation in the Klan yielded crucial information which he gave to the authorities over the course of 1946 and 1947. In 1947, after a year of working undercover, Kennedy ditched his pseudonym and left the Klan in order to testify in a trial against the leaders of a Klan-affiliated neo-Nazi group called "The Columbians" in Atlanta. His testimony ensured that the leaders of the Columbians were found guilty and sent to prison on charges of incitement to riot (these Columbians and several others of the group had demonstrated outside the home of a black couple who bought the property from white owners), and usurping police powers. Many years later, Kennedy said about the Columbians, the Klan, and other racial supremacist groups: "There were an awful lot of evils abroad in the world at the time, as there still are, but I couldn't help but feel that racism was perhaps the most evil." After leaving the Klan, Kennedy went on the radio program "The Adventures of Superman" and he told all of its listeners the innermost secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, including their codewords and solemn rituals. He even read out the roll call sheets of many sheriffs, public officials, and businessmen who attended Klan meetings. For example, one secret which he exposed was that a traveling Klan member seeking out fellow Klansmen in a new town would ask for a “Mr. Ayak” — "Ayak” (Are You a Klansman?) If the other person's response was: “Yes, and I also know a Mr. Akai” — "Akai" (A Klansman Am I), then the Klan member knew he had a buddy. Kennedy's trivialization and exposure of the Klan's secrets on the radio show were credited with stripping the Klan's mystique from them and causing some damage to their recruitment rates. Not only this, but information from Kennedy helped the IRS press for the collection of a $685,000 tax lien from the group - a massive hit to the Klan's pocketbooks. Naturally, the Klan was severely unhappy by what Kennedy had done. The Klan firebombed his house several times in retaliation. That, coupled with many threats to his life, forced Kennedy to flee to France for eight years. But Kennedy later returned home to Florida and he was credited with taking part in civil rights sit-ins in the 1960s, and he also reported on demonstrations led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Klan never got Kennedy for what he did to the organization - he died peacefully in 2011.