in Atlanta burned a 300-foot cross on the face of Stone Mountain, site of a sto- ried rock carving of Robert E. Lee. The extravagant cross burning, one Klansman later said, was intended "just to let the niggers know the war is over and that the Klan is back on the market." Atlanta had by now become Klan headquarters. The Klan held great sway with key Georgia politicians, and its Georgia chapters in- cluded many policemen and sheriff s deputies. Yes, the Klan was a se- cret society, reveling in passwords and cloak-and-dagger ploys, but its real power lay in the very public fear that it fostered-exemplified by the open secret that the Ku Klux Klan and the law-enforcement es- tablishment were brothers in arms. Atlanta-the Imperial City of the KKKs Invisible Empire, in Klan jargon-was also home to Stetson Kennedy, a thirty-year-old man with the bloodlines of a Klansman but a temperament that ran oppo- site. He came from a prominent southern family whose ancestors in- cluded two signers of the Declaration of Independence, an officer in the Confederate Army, and John B. Stetson, founder of the famed hat company and the man for whom Stetson University was named. Stetson Kennedy grew up in a fourteen-room house in Jackson-   ville, Florida, the youngest of five children. His uncle Brady was a Klansman. But he got his first real exposure to the Klan when the familys maid, Flo, who had pretty much raised Stetson, was tied to a tree, beaten, and raped by a gang of Klansmen. Her offense: talking back to a white trolley driver who had shortchanged her. Because Kennedy couldnt fight in World War II-he had had a bad back since childhood-he felt compelled to defend his country at home. Its worst enemy, he believed, was bigotry. Kennedy became a self-described "dissident at large," writing anti-bigotry articles and books. He became close friends with Woody Guthrie, Richard Wright, and a host of other progressives; Jean-Paul Sartre published his work in France.