First off, he was awesome because he was a pioneering folklorist who traveled the south with Zora Neale Hurston for the WPA, even though Jim Crow laws forbade them from going in the same car, staying at the same place overnight, and even taking meals together. He and Zora chronicled the folk life of America that would have been lost forever had someone not taken the time to write it down, to record it, to acknowledge its existence.
Second, he was buddies with Woody Guthrie.
Third, he was kept out of World War II because of a bum back and so instead of fighting racist fucktards over in Europe, he decide to fight them closer to home.
He infiltrated the KKK in Georgia and would pass on their plans to the authorities whenever they were going to do something dastardly. But almost better still, he reported on their ridiculous ceremonies, handshakes, and beliefs to the papers and then became a consultant on the Superman radio program, where he got them exposed to the masses and held up for ridicule as Superman kicked the asses of fictionalized Klan members.
In his book, The Klan Unmasked, he details the tense and exciting project that he and at least one other infiltrator undertook and the ways in which their work dealt almost the killing blow to the legitimacy of the KKK in the American South after World War II.
Dude lived with death threats the rest of his life. But we know who won.
The ancient Greeks used to find their folk heroes in the stars, where the Gods had placed them to be remembered. America has to make some room in its mythic heavens. You can put Stetson right up there with John Henry and Johnny Appleseed and Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan in my book.
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