"Kennedy was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1916. He grew up in the 14-room, white-columned house owned by his traditional southern family. The Kennedy’s boasted blood ties to Confederate war heroes and wealthy cotton planters and prided themselves on carrying on the southern way of life. Kennedy’s mother taught her children traditional values and manners and dutifully attended meetings of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. His father ran a furniture store and served as chairman of the board of deacons at the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville. Insatiably curious, energetic and, and sensitive as a boy, Kennedy earned a reputation as the free spirit of the family. His grandmother used to offer him two cents to sit still for two minutes and almost never had to pay him the pennies. The oldest of five children, Kennedy spent much of his free time exploring the surrounding woods, creeks, orchards, and orange groves. He loved to write stories and poems about the birds, animals, trees and waterways that defined rural North Florida. In time he began to contemplate the lives of the people who lived on the ramshackle farms and in the small towns in the area. Sensing an injustice in the poverty that gripped the lives of so many, he began to feel a burning passion to do something about it. He was particularly disturbed by the prevailing view that “colored folk” were to be treated as subservient to white people. Although he couldn’t quite understand why, that pervasive racism got under his skin. It happened early,” Kenned would recall later in his life. “Whatever it was.” Still, he saw his family as “no more, no less, racist than the norm, par for the course, southern white.”"