Stetson Kennedy, the folklorist, journalist, and undercover investigator who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s, has died at the age of 94. According to his New York Times obituary:

As an agent for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Kennedy, by his own account, infiltrated the Klavern in Stone Mountain and worked as a Klavalier, or Klan strong-arm man. He leaked his findings to, among others, the Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson, the Anti-Defamation League and the producers of the radio show “Superman,” who used information about the Klan’s rituals and code words in a multi-episode story titled “Clan of the Fiery Cross.”

In a celebrated exploit, he stole financial information from a wastebasket outside the office of the Klan’s Imperial Wizard, Sam Roper, in Atlanta.

The information led the Internal Revenue Service to challenge the group’s status as a charitable organization and demand nearly $700,000 in back taxes. He helped draft the brief that Georgia used to revoke the Klan’s national corporate charter in 1947. 

No doubt, Kennedy’s sense of humor helped sustain him during his long career as a self-described “dissident at large.” He founded a rival “Ku Klux Klan” so that he could sue the real Klan for using the name.

In later years, Kennedy was criticized for failing to properly credit other undercover agents in his expose of the Klan. Kennedy was part of a team of three people who infiltrated the Klan, not the lone investigator he described in his most famous book. He admitted to creating a composite character under his own name, arguing that it made a more compelling story.

Kennedy was unrepentant about that decision. His goal was to tell people about the Ku Klux Klan; he was less concerned about the mechanics of telling what he knew. As Bill James notes in his recent book, Popular Crime, non-fiction authors of that era had a lot more leeway to use undeclared fictional devices: “Book writers of the 1940s did many things that would never be tolerated for a modern writer who wished to remain respectable.” Thankfully, the standards for narrative non-fiction are more rigorous today.

Note that exposing the Klan wasn’t an achievement prudent people clamoured to take credit for. One of Kennedy’s team members was a Klan defector turned labor organizer, a man who might have been reluctant to share the spotlight.

In any event, Kennedy produced voluminous documentation to support the claims he made about the Klan. There’s no question that he helped infiltrate the group and did great harm to the organization by holding its secretive rituals up for ridicule.

Stetson Kennedy deserves to be remembered for his bravery and his contributions to American journalism, even if his storytelling devices wouldn’t pass muster today.

[Photo credit: Wikimedia, Creative Commons.]

The dedication ceremony for the monument to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the National Mall has been postponed as the East Coast braces for Hurricane Irene. Alex Seitz-Wald of Think Progress notes that the $120 million monument to one of the greatest champions of workers’ rights in American history was assembled by Chinese laborers. The American union whose membership has helped to assemble every major monument erected in Washington since the Civil War watched from the sidelines, despite a promise to hire union labor to complete the King monument.

The foundation that built the monument promised in writing to hire members of the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers (BAC) to assemble the 159 blocks of granite that comprise the two sculptures at the site. However, the foundation reneged, though it apparently hired BAC members do to other work on the project.

The sculptor of record, Master Lei Yixin, who won the blinded international competition to design the monument, brought over nearly a dozen workers from China to help him finish the project on site.

It has been reported that the Chinese workers were unpaid. BAC investigator Francis Jacobberger and Washington Post reporter Annys Shin learned in the fall of 2010 that the men were working for “national honor.” In other words, they weren’t getting paid while they were in the United States, working on Dr. King. They expected to get paid at least something when they got back to China, but they didn’t know how much. It’s not clear whether they ever got paid.

Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis while preparing to lead a march of unionized sanitation workers striking for higher wages and better working conditions. Displacing union workers with cheap labor from China is a betrayal of his legacy.

[Photo credit: Black History Album, Creative Commons.]

This month’s Sidney Award winner, Tom Gogola, wrote about how dysfunctional fishing regulations force commercial fishermen to waste tons of edible bycatch and how new technology is helping to reduce bycatch.

Bycatch is any creature a fisher catches while fishing for something else, edible or not.

In other bycatch news, Cornelia Dean of the New York Times delves deeper into the burgeoning field of anti-bycatch technology.

Dean reports on the work of the Consortium for Wildlife Bycatch Reduction, a research center administered by the New England Aquarium where fishers and scientists work together to refine fishing gear to reduce bycatch:

The new efforts focus on modifications to fishing gear. They include relatively simple steps, like changes in hook design, and more complex ones: making fishing lines more visible to whales, changing noise levels on fishing boats and impregnating metal gear with substances meant to repel “bycatch species” like sharks.

Engineered bycatch reduction goes back to the 1990s in the Gulf of Maine, where harbor porpoises were turning up in fishermen’s nets. On the theory that porpoises are sensitive to noise, engineers and biologists developed beer-can-size devices that emitted pinging noises underwater. Within weeks of attaching the pingers to their nets, fishermen saw porpoise bycatch drop by 90 percent.

Historically, fishers have suspected that scientists are out of touch with the practical realities of fishing and scientists have countered that fishers are uninterested in conservation and resistant to change. Dean suggests that, in addition to saving innocent sea creatures, joint research efforts like these may ultimately help bridge the cultural gap between the two groups.

[Photo credit: Chris Vees, Creative Commons.]

Back-alley cosmetologists prey on transwomen in New York City, peddling black market silicone injections, which temporarily enhance feminine curves at great risk to the clients’ health, Laura Rena Murray reports in the New York Times. In February, a young woman died shortly after receiving black market silicone injections in Philadelphia. In July a young transwoman* named Gabrielle Aguilar died in a Queens hospital shortly after visiting a unlicensed “pumper,” as these practitioners are known.

Why would anyone seek out an unlicensed operator to pump industrial grade silicone into her buttocks and plug the holes with Krazy Glue, as one of Murray’s subjects did? With great compassion, Murray captures the yearning that these women have for something that most of us take for granted, a body that fits with our sense of ourselves:

Zaira Quispe, 42, said she knew as a child that she was a girl, though she had been born male. She picked up a photo that she kept on the windowsill above her bed and held it out as proof. It’s a picture of herself as a smiling baby, naked and with legs crossed, concealing genitals. “Look,” she said, “even then I was trying to hide it.”

Ms. Quispe, an Ecuadorean immigrant who came to New York at age 9, was determined to get the curves that would make her look more feminine. But she lacked health insurance or the money to pay for surgical procedures that would provide them; they can cost as much as $70,000. So she tried something else: she went to a so-called pumper, a person who illegally injects silicone to modify the body.

Ms. Quispe was initially delighted with the results, but over time the liquid calcified and spread, causing infection, disfigurement, and constant pain. In 2002, a doctor told her that the liquid she thought was silicone was actually industrial oil. He said the oil had insinuated itself so deeply into her flesh that there was no way to surgically remove it without cutting out huge chunks of her hip and buttocks muscles. Fearing the treatment would be more debilitating than the disease, he told her to go home and take painkillers instead.

So, Ms. Quispe returned to her tiny apartment in Brooklyn’s Farragut Houses to live as a virtual shut-in. She’s bedridden for most of the day. Besides, she says, she’d rather stay indoors than endure the stares of her neighbors. But she may not be able to avoid surgery forever. The oil has riled her body into a constant state of inflammation. This summer she was hospitalized for bloodthinner injections to dissolve potentially lethal blood clots before they could travel to her heart.

Murray contrasts Ms. Quispe’s hardships with the opulant lifestyle of S, a New York City pumper who says she brings in $10,000 a week injecting clients with medical grade silicone she acquires on the black market:

The evidence of her success crowds the spacious two-bedroom apartment she rents in Brooklyn. The exterior of her building fits in with the dilapidated neighborhood. The front door is missing a doorknob, and the windows are boarded up and painted a mud brown, concealing the opulent interior. Inside her apartment, gold candleholders, ceramic vases, crystal and gleaming white cherubic angels sparkle under elaborate chandeliers. Thirteen Tiffany-style lamps clutter her shelves, and dozens of porcelain plates hang in rows on her walls.

One corner of her dining room contains 10 bird cages stacked in two columns from floor to ceiling, the sides of the cages covered in tin foil and each cage holding three to six canaries, finches and other small birds.

The living room is crammed with stacks of boxes containing items that she plans to move to a house she said she recently bought in Puerto Rico.

S, a transwoman whose face bears pumping, says that she’s helping her clients, unlike some of the 50 or so illegal pumpers she estimates to be operating in the city. Not everyone is willing to make fine-grained distinctions based on craftsmanship:

“Pumpers are preying on desperate people who are poor,” said Pauline Park, president of Queens Pride House, an organization that provides services to lesbian, gay and transgender people. “They’re basically killing people and profiting from it.”

Murray notes that many pumping clients are underage. For some transgenderd youth, pumping is a quick and relatively cheap way to look more feminine. Many see it as stopgap measure on the road to a more expensive sex reassignment surgery. Ms. Quispe ruefully estimates that if she’d saved the money she spent on silicone injections, she could have afforded her surgery by now.

A lesser reporter might have focused exclusively on the sensational details of pumping, whereas Murray is careful to explain the connection between this disturbing phenomenon and the widespread discrimination and social dislocation that transgender people face:

Transgender youth cannot be treated by a doctor without parental consent, and many of them are estranged from their families because of their gender identities. According to a 2011 discrimination report released by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 19 percent of transgender people experienced homelessness because of their gender identity, 57 percent were rejected by their families, and 41 percent had attempted suicide.

Murray resists the temptation to demonize the pumpers or scold their clients. She consults experts who explain that the black market is a symptom of a larger problem, namely, transwomen being shut out of the medical system because of poverty, bad insurance, family breakdown, and other systemic factors. Hers is an excellent story that deserves to be widely read.

*Terminological note: “Transgender“ describes a person whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. A transwoman, short for “transgender woman,” is someone who was labelled as male at birth but who identifies as female. “Transgender” is a synonym for the outdated term “transsexual.”

[Photo credit: Photo of a generic syringe, for illustration, by ZaldyImg, Creative Commons.]