April 30, 2026 • 47 mins
In the final part of the story about Jack Kershaw, we'll talk about his legal career. Before he represented MLK's assassin, before he sculpted a gigantic racist statue out of old bathtubs, he got a law degree from a part time night school program at the YMCA so he could do his part to stop integration.
Sources:
Phillips, Betsy. Dynamite Nashville: the FBI, the KKK, and the bombers beyond their control. Third Man Books 2021.
Houston, Benjamin, et al. “‘We Kept the Discussion at an Adult Level’: Jack Kershaw and the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government.” Southern Cultures, vol. 20, no. 4, 2014, pp. 72–88. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26217566
Graham, Hugh Davis. “Desegregation in Nashville: The Dynamics of Compliance.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 2, 1966, pp. 135–54. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42622869
McMillen, Neil R. “Organized Resistance to School Desegregation In Tennessee.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 3, 1971, pp. 315–28. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42623247
Michael J. Henry, Student Display of the Confederate Flag in Public Schools, 33 J.L. & EDUC. 573 (2004).
https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2824&context=jled
Egerton, Joel. Walking into History: The Beginning of School Desegregation in Nashville
https://southernspaces.org/2009/walking-history-beginning-school-desegregation-nashville/
https://www.ahcuah.com/lawsuit/federal/melton.htm
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/328/88/1428295/
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/42777957/james-n-mason/
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/BR/81/897/1821803/
https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/the-fugitives/
https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/clinton-desegregation-crisis/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/us/nashville-civil-rights-bombings.html
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. In January of nineteen seventy nine, there
was a minor fender bender outside of a parking garage
in downtown Nashville. The damage was nothing to get upset about,
less than fifty dollars worth, just a scratch, really, but
(00:24):
the driver responsible fled the scene. It's a thing of principle,
the traffic investigator told the Tennesseean, and the man whose
car had been hit swore out a warrant against the driver.
People saw it happen, they knew who he was. Gregory King,
a postal worker, says the man hit his car, swore
(00:47):
at him, and then drove off. Witnesses saw the man
back into King's car, opened his door to survey the damage,
and then hit the gas so hard his tire squeamiel
as he left the scene. And when the driver was
served with the warrant for leaving the scene of an accident,
he didn't deny it. Instead, he claimed he had to
(01:10):
leave for his own safety, saying, quote, he was an excited,
very angry black man. I don't know what kind of
weapons they carry, and I didn't intend to hang around
to find out. Nothing ever came of it. The newspaper
described him as a controversial Nashville attorney, citing his one
(01:34):
claim to fame his recent, albeit brief work for the
man who killed Martin Luther King Junior. But by nineteen
seventy nine, Jack Kershaw's time as an attorney was mostly
behind him, who was already an old man, And while
the newspaper in nineteen seventy nine was unwilling to call
the man a racist, it's hard to come up with
(01:54):
a more concise way to describe the legal career of
a man who only went to law school because he
thought it would help him stop integration. I'm Molly Conger,
and this is weird, little guys. I've made a bit
(02:28):
of a mess of things again. I mean, the story
got away from me, but that always happens. I'm not
sorry about that anymore. But between getting sick and getting
distracted by a side story about a princess, part three
of this story is showing up weeks after the first two.
Lucky for you, those first two parts are still there
(02:49):
on your podcast app if you want to revisit them.
And we are going to finish up with Jack Kershaw today,
but not in the way that I'd planned. I thought
this portion of his story would get deeper into his
actual legacy in this world, not the hideous racist statue
that got taken down a few years ago, but the
(03:11):
hate group that he founded. But I think that needs
a little more breathing room, especially given some recent developments.
I mean, if the President is going to go on
sixty minutes and accuse the Southern Poverty Law Center of
funding the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in twenty seventeen,
I think I am going to have to devote a
(03:33):
little more than a passing mention to some of the
known sources of funding for that Nazi rally. Jack Kershaw
was dead by twenty seventeen. He doesn't have much to
do with this, not directly, but the group he started
and the charitable fund he named after his dead wife
were very much still around. The SPLC may have paid
(03:56):
an informant, but to say that they wholly fund did
the event, that the event itself was a hoax put
on to make racists look bad, that's a gross mischaracterization.
It is revisionist history designed to excuse violent white supremacy.
I mean, of course, the president's a liar. He's always lying.
(04:19):
But this is a lie I know something about. So
I'm going to carve out a little time to talk
about that, just not today. This isn't a show about
current events. I feel like I say that all the time.
I'd like to have a real body of records to
look back on when I'm writing an episode. And it's
(04:39):
been kind of a relief, really these last two years,
being able to let breaking news just wash over me
rather than scramble to ride that wave before it passes
me by. I don't have to drop what I'm doing
this week to write that story right now. I can
finish writing this one, and I'll slot this week's current
(05:02):
events into their place and the history I'm writing when
I've had a little more time to let things settle
into place. I hope you don't mind waiting. I know
quite a few listeners have been anxious to hear my
take on the indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center
regarding their alleged payments to far right informants. So I
just wanted to let you know I hear you. I'm
(05:25):
thinking about it, and we will talk about it. I
would just rather offer you something thoughtful and contextualized than
an off the cuff hot take. So back to Jack
Jack Kershaw was a racist. I mean, you've probably guessed
that by now, it would be a rare guy on
(05:47):
this show who wasn't. And you can kind of infer
what sort of racial beliefs he had based on his
obsession with a confederacy. He loved the idea of the
ante bellum South so much much that he pretended to
have a Confederate admiral for a grandfather, a funny little
lie we uncovered in the first episode about him, And
(06:10):
it's hard to imagine someone who would lovingly sculpt a
twenty five foot tall statue of a clan wizard out
of bathtubs is someone who has normal views about black people.
You can guess that Jack Kershaw was racist. You can
assume that that might have had something to do with
his eagerness to represent Martin Luther King Junior's assassin. But
(06:34):
so far we've talked about his big, ugly statue and
the time he tricked a prison warden into letting Playboy
magazine polygraph and assassin. We haven't really talked about how
he came to be the man who did those things.
Jack Kershaw didn't graduate law school until nineteen sixty two,
(06:56):
a few months before his forty ninth birthday. It was
a late in life career change for a man who
studied geology while at Vanderbilt on a football scholarship, and
he worked in the arts after college. There are a
million reasons someone might pivot in midlife, but in Jack
Kershaw's case, there was just one Brown versus Board of Education.
(07:23):
He had to find some way to stop it. We've
brushed up against this piece of history before. I believe
it was the Raymond Turner episode recently that got into
the history of massive resistance a little bit, that Southern
strategy of resisting school desegregation after the Brown verse Board
of Education Supreme Court decision in nineteen fifty four and
(07:45):
the decision known as Brown two that came a year later.
That second decision ordered public schools to integrate, with the
maddeningly vague direction of doing it with all deliberate speed.
Kershaw was already engaged to some degree with extreme right
wing and segregationist politics in the late nineteen forties. He
(08:08):
was involved in efforts to get strom Thurmond on the
ballot in Tennessee as the Dixie Krat Party's candidate in
the nineteen forty eight presidential election. If the Dixiecrat Party
doesn't ring any bells, I wouldn't worry about it right now.
It's exactly what it sounds like, and it only existed
for a few months in nineteen forty eight. And perhaps
(08:30):
it was on that nineteen forty eight campaign that Jack
Kershaw forged his close friendship with the poet Donald Davidson.
Almost every source about Kershaw's life uncritically repeats his claim
that he was involved with something called the Fugitive Poets
during his time at Vanderbilt, and the fact that he
(08:51):
and Donald Davidson were so close in the fifties and
sixties seems to lend support to the possibility of that
being true. But the math doesn't work. The Fugitives were
a group of poets, literary critics, writers, and scholars who
published a literary magazine called The Fugitive at Vanderbilt University
(09:11):
in the nineteen twenties. Jack Kershaw was ten years old
when this was happening. He claimed he was involved in
the group, and the claim appears everywhere, and the only
source I found that points out that this is not
possible because the Fugitives disbanded in the late twenties and
(09:32):
Kershaw didn't enroll at Vanderbilt until nineteen thirty two. Was
the book Dynamite Nashville by Betsy Phillips. I only read
the portions of her book that I needed for this episode,
but I'm going to keep it out so I can
come back to it. She got the Nashville police to
reopen a seventy year old unsolved bombing case, and you know,
(09:54):
I can't resist the siren song of a well laid
out theory, but an unsolved clan bombing. I'm not just
saying that because I think she's a listener. I'm actually
looking forward to finishing that book. Point is, Jack Kershaw
was a football player and a geology major who showed
up at Vanderbilt after this group of influential literary critics
(10:15):
had mostly moved on, and Betsy's book is the only
source I could find where anyone questions the veracity of
that claim. So he's probably lying about being directly involved
with the original Fugitive poets, but the kernel of truth
is that he was after college and long after the
(10:37):
demise of the group, close to one of its founders,
Donald Davidson. Davidson was a founding member of the Fugitive Poets,
and he was still an English professor at Vanderbilt when
Kershaw was a student there. It's not clear, based on
the sources I could find, if they actually met when
Kershaw was a student in the thirties or if they
(10:59):
kept in time throughout the forties. But in nineteen forty
eight the pair worked on strom Thurman's presidential campaign together
in Tennessee, and in nineteen fifty five, Davidson and Kershaw
formed a relatively short lived group called the Tennessee Federation
for Constitutional Government. It's a vague sounding name, and that's intentional,
(11:25):
and there's not a lot of easily accessible information about
the group. A two thousand and nine article about desegregation
in Nashville by journalist John Egerton calls it a group
quote about which little is known except that it had
close ties to the White Citizens Councils and its chairman
was Vanderbilt professor Donald Davidson. And that's a reasonable description.
(11:49):
I mean, the article discusses their role in an ensuing conflict,
but it's not wrong to say that there's just not
an abundance of information about the group. In twenty fourteen,
historian Benjamin Houston published a transcript of an interview he'd
conducted with Jack Kershaw a few years before Kershaw died.
(12:11):
I'd been trying to piece together this group's motivations based
on snippets from newspaper articles from nineteen fifty six. So
it was so strange to see an old man's uncomfortably
candid recollection of the first hate group that he founded.
As he's looking back on his life at ninety years old.
(12:33):
When he was asked about the founding of the Tennessee
Federation for Constitutional Government, Kershaw said, quote, I was instrumental
in founding that organization, and we considered that it was
a very important question of the day. Our position, briefly
was that the government was burgeoning large in an unhealthy way,
and that if compulsory segregation was wrong, then compulsory integration
(12:55):
certainly is wrong. Because both positions involve freedom of association.
The judiciary and the country as a whole are still
struggling with that problem today. It's called affirmative action and
that sort of thing, and it amounts really to compulsory association,
same as it ever was. I guess this old racist
(13:15):
is saying what plenty of conservatives feel in the silence
of their hearts. Right, he's saying, yeah, we lost on segregation,
but this is the same fight. We have to fight
affirmative action, we have to fight DEI, we have to
fight diversity, we have to fight wokeness, we have to
fight whatever it's called today. And it's just a modern
iteration of the same decades long fight to return to
(13:39):
a fully segregated society. He is saying the same thing
in this two thousand and three interview as he said
to reporters in nineteen fifty five. His language has not
really changed. The whole interview is truly a fascinating record.
(13:59):
He told Houston it was not a collection of rednecks
by any means, which is the charge leveled at all
Southern organizations. There were school teachers, writers, lawyers, and housewives.
Of course, at a Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government meeting,
the discussion could be very illuminating and informed. So again
(14:22):
he's saying what these kinds of guys still say today. Right,
were a respectable institution, And everyone seems to agree that
the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government was a respectable organization.
We keep falling for the same trick. I mean, the
white citizens Councils existed so that respectable people who had
(14:45):
the same politics as clan members could organize in a
more respectable, middle class fashion. But if you look into
the history of the white Citizen Councils in the mid
twentieth century, there are a lot of cases where the
groups had more in common than just their ideas. They
often shared members. It was the same guys in different
(15:07):
outfits on different days of the week. And we have
the same thing here. The Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government
initially distanced itself from even the Citizens Councils, saying that
they were only interested in constitutional law and government overreach,
none of this nasty racial business. Right, So the Klan,
(15:30):
the Citizens Councils, the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, it's
all the same ideas and the same goals, but on
this spectrum of respectability. And so everyone is distancing themselves
from the guy who's a little bit more uncouth than
he is. But in many cases they're getting drinks together afterwards.
(15:54):
A nineteen sixty six article in the Tennessee Historical Quarterly,
reflecting on the still very recent history of desegregation in Tennessee,
notes that the Federation quite literally used the word respectable
to describe itself, was a group that appealed to respectable people.
(16:15):
A nineteen seventy one article in the same publication called
the group quote comparatively dignified and restrained in comparison to
other groups or violent agitators, this was a group of
polite people, educated people, people interested in peaceful, lawful action.
(16:36):
That action is not described as a form of violence,
right because violence, too exists on a spectrum of respectability,
and going to court to enforce violence is not seen
as participating in that violence. But this group, their professors
and businessmen, their attorneys and artists throughout gutter races. They're
(17:01):
not instigators. They're not brick throwers. They file for injunctions,
they don't start riots, and they tried to keep their
distance from those who did. Again, it's the same as
it ever was. The white power movement has always had
suits and boots, the street fighters and the paper pushers.
(17:26):
They need both. They denounce one another as traders and
wreckers and people who don't have the right ideas or
the right backbone, the right commitment. But deep down, the
ones who understand what they're doing, they know they need
each other. I think it was in one of the
American Third Position Party episodes a few months back. I
(17:49):
actually played a recording of a meeting where they were
both skinheads and racist professors who were members of the
same organization, and they said out loud, they articulated this idea.
They said, they need each other. They both have their
parts to play. This is such an important theme to
(18:12):
keep highlighting when we encounter it in these stories, because
we have to identify this pattern. We have to stop
believing them when they say we're the nice, respectable racists.
Don't worry about us. In that two thousand and three
(18:40):
interview recalling his involvement in this group in the nineteen fifties,
Kershaw said they weren't rabble rousers. They weren't there to
stir up trouble. Quote. We kept the discussion at an
adult level, informed adult level. They weren't like those other racists.
They had reason and philosophy and court orders. They weren't
(19:05):
like these nasty boys outside. There was an intellectual, reasoned racism.
He wouldn't even call it racism, to be honest. When
Benjamin Houston asked him how he felt about being accused
of being a racist, specifically in the context of his
gigantic sculpture of Nathan Bedford Forest, he said, quote, it
(19:27):
doesn't bother me. I'm used to stupidity. I didn't get offended.
I guess I'd be a little bit disappointed if they
didn't get a little bit outrageous and call me racist.
But yes, I can tell a difference between black and white.
If you are such a racist that you don't know
the difference between black and white, you're insulting your black
brother because he's different and he's proud of it and
(19:48):
he wants to develop that way. Let's not reply to
a racist. So it's more racist if you're not racist.
Hard to say what he thinks he means by that,
because this is the same man, bear in mind, who,
in another conversation about his big racist statue, famously said quote,
(20:11):
somebody needs to say a good word for slavery. The
Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government sort of fades out as
desegregation becomes a political inevitability. They failed, and Jack Kershaw
was willing to admit that in that two thousand and
(20:32):
three interview, Benjamin Houston asked him if he thought the
group had been effective. Well, we failed utterly, of course,
he said. Compulsory integration did occur. We were opposed to that.
We were effective in bringing to the forefront reasonable conversation,
civilized exchange on the subject, and perhaps prevented some more
(20:55):
rapid folks from stirring things up unnecessarily. And he refers
several times in that interview to a particular incident where
one of these more rabid folks stirred things up unnecessarily
against the will of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government,
(21:15):
and the incident he's referring to is the most famous
incident in the history of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government,
the Clinton desegregation crisis. By court order, schools in Anderson County, Tennessee,
would begin the nineteen fifty six school year without segregation.
(21:39):
Until that year, black students in Anderson County had to
take a bus half an hour to Knoxville if they
wanted to attend school, But that fall, twelve black students,
the Clinton twelve, as they came to be called, would
attend the previously all white Clinton High School. Just before
the school year began, John Casper showed up. We'll have
(22:03):
to circle back to Casper, because he is He is
a weird little guy, and I was very intrigued to
see that he drove straight to Clinton from the last
town where he'd been stirring up trouble over segregation. He
drove to Tennessee from Charlottesville, Virginia. I had no idea
that Casper was buzzing around Charlottesville in nineteen fifty six,
(22:27):
So I'm going to have to come back to that one.
But in August of nineteen fifty six, when he was
done causing problems in Charlottesville, John Casper showed up in Clinton, Tennessee.
He was, as you've guessed by now, a segregationist. He
was a clansman and a member of the White Citizens Council,
and he was bound and determined to cause problems in Clinton.
(22:53):
The Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government denounced John Casper as
a rabble rouser and an outside agitator, insisting that their
method of fighting desegregation in the courts was the only
proper way to go about it. But I kind of
think part of the problem is that they were just
a little bit sour that Casper got to Clinton first. Right,
(23:15):
they were in the city in a courtroom, filing motions,
and Casper was out there on the street riling up crowds,
getting headlines and make it a mess. The Federation absolutely
had planned to and attempted to and kind of did
(23:35):
hold rallies in the streets in Clinton, but because John
Casper got there first, tensions were already very high, and
riot police prevented Kershaw from giving his own rousing speech
to the screaming mobs. When rioting broke out over Laborty
weekend in nineteen fifty six, John Casper was arrested sixteen
(24:00):
others who were charged with violating a court order that
prohibited them from interfering with desegregation at Clinton High School.
The Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government refused to have anything
to do with Casper, and they placed most of the
blame for the riots on him, but they fundraised for
and organized the legal defense of the people they referred
to as the Clinton sixteen. Those sixteen people arrested for
(24:25):
violating the court order preventing them from causing disorder outside
the high school. Several people in the Clinton sixteen were
openly identified as members of White Citizens Councils and the
ku Klux Klan, the very kind of people the Federation
is pretending that it doesn't associate with or support. And
(24:47):
Jack Kershaw, as vice chairman of the Tennessee Federation for
Constitutional Government, was tasked with heading up this effort for
legal defense. Ultimately, those sixteen segregationists, Scott slaps on the
wrists they paid fines. In that two thousand and three interview,
Jack Kershaw recalls his role in this effort, saying, quote,
(25:09):
we had several distinguished lawyers in our group. I wasn't
a lawyer at the time, but I organized the law
defense for the Clinton sixteen charged with blowing up the school.
And isn't that an odd thing to say? The Clinton sixteen,
the sixteen segregationists that he organized a legal defense for.
(25:31):
The people he's talking about. They were arrested in nineteen
fifty six. They were arrested for violating a court order.
They were arrested for rioting outside of the school in
September of nineteen fifty six. That's what he's talking about.
That is the only thing he can possibly be talking about.
They went to court, they fought their cases and there
(25:54):
weren't any serious consequences. The Clinton sixteen were not charged
blowing up the school, but Clinton High School did get
blown up in nineteen fifty eight, two years later, and
no one was ever charged for blowing up that school.
(26:17):
We don't know who bombed Clinton High School, but it
sounds like Jack Kershaw did know. It was his experience
in the aftermath of the crisis in Clinton that showed
him how important lawyers were to the movement. He had
helped organize the lawyers, he set up the meetings, he
helped raise the funds, but that was all he could do,
(26:41):
and he wanted to do more, so he went to
law school kind of I mean no offense to graduates
of what is now known as the Nashville School of Law,
but when Kershaw attended, it was still called the Nashville
YMCA Night Law School, because that's what it was. It
(27:03):
was a part time program with night classes held in
least classrooms at the Nashville YMCA. To this day, the
school is not accredited by the American Bar Association, although
it does have the approval of the Tennessee Board of
Law Examiners, so graduates can take the bar exam and
practice law in Tennessee, but only in Tennessee. It's a
(27:28):
four year program, but based on the dates I could
pin down, it looks like it took Jack six years
to complete it. But he did eventually get his jd
and presumably he passed the bar in Tennessee. Jack and
his wife both graduated from the YMCA Night Law School
(27:49):
in nineteen sixty two. Throughout the nineteen sixties and into
the early seventies, he used that law degree to fight
tooth and nail to slow down integration. Newspapers are dotted
with mentions of him headlining rallies and towns all over Tennessee,
organizing white parents and white citizens councils to advocate against
(28:10):
integrated schools. As a leader in his local White Citizens
Council in Nashville and the executive secretary of the state
wide Citizens Council in Tennessee, he traveled all over the state,
riling up parents didn't want their kids to go to
integrated schools. One nineteen sixty three article describes a meeting
(28:30):
in Haywood County that opened with the reverend making a
biblical argument for segregation, followed by a rousing speech from
Kershaw urging them to take legal action. In nineteen seventy one,
at a rally in Nashville urging white parents to boycott
the public schools over the district's busing program, Kershaw told
parents that they had quote the right to self defense
(28:54):
and self preservation, adding rather ominously, quote, I will leave
it to your conscience to decide what to do. We
not only have the right, but the duty to stand
up for the well being of our children. And maybe
he was talking about the boycott, But the bit about
(29:15):
self defense makes me wonder if he's not talking about
something like what happened to the first school district he
ever organized in back in nineteen fifty six. He failed
then too. Black students attended Clinton High School that year.
But maybe someone felt it with self defense, self preservation,
(29:36):
even to protect white children from integration when they put
a hundred sticks of dynamite in that school two years later.
But maybe when he said that in Nashville he was
just talking about the boycott. I think the actual most
(30:07):
important case Jack Kershaw's legal career was one that he lost.
I was picking through newspapers, getting bored collecting these odds
and ends about busing cases and injunctions and petitions and
racist speeches and little town halls all over Tennessee. When
I stumbled across Jack Kershaw's name someplace interesting, I mean,
(30:29):
he was in a newspaper of sorts. It was a
newspaper we've talked about before. It was in a November
nineteen seventy one issue of The Thunderbolt, the official newspaper
of JB. Stoner's National States Rights Party. We talked about J. B.
Stoner pretty extensively in the Josephaul Franklin series. He was
(30:52):
a staunch segregationist and anti semite and a serial bomber.
I wonder if they knew each other, Jack Kershaw on JB. Stoner,
when I can't find any direct evidence that they did.
But the world of States rights politics in late nineteen
fifties Tennessee wasn't so big that they wouldn't have run
(31:12):
into one another. And the man who co founded the
National States Rights Party with Stoner in nineteen fifty eight,
racist chiropractor Ed Fields, was at the ride in Clinton
in nineteen fifty six, so they certainly had friends in common,
and they both at different points in time represented James
(31:33):
Earl Ray. It's a small world, so I wouldn't say
I was shocked to see Jack Kershaw's name in an
issue of The Thunderbolt, but I was excited and the
article was about his client, a young man named Rod Melton.
Melton had been suspended from Brainerd High School in Chattanooga
(31:56):
for refusing to take off a jacket with a Confederate
flag on it. God, it sounds so modern. Seems like
just yesterday we were arguing over whether kids can wear
Confederate flag shirts to school at Almrall County. Brainard High
School had banned the display of the Confederate flag starting
in the nineteen seventy school year. Brainard High School had
(32:18):
only been integrated for a few years, starting in nineteen
sixty six, and in nineteen sixty nine, the school's few
black students protested the school's use of Dixie as their
pep rally song and the use of the Confederate flag
as the school symbol. It escalated pretty quickly and it
(32:38):
got out of hand. It started with walkouts, black students
staging walkouts at pep rally's. Then huge numbers of white
students held their own walkouts to protest rumors that the
flag would be banned. A few black students rushed the
(32:58):
field during a football game tried to burn a Confederate
flag in the middle of the field. White residents, students,
their parents, and people who had nothing to do with
the school held rallies waving Confederate flags. Rocks were thrown,
fights broke out, Police were called, and in October of
(33:18):
nineteen sixty nine, the city of Chattanooga imposed a city
wide curfew for several nights to try to stop tensions
from boiling over. Throughout the fall and winter of nineteen
sixty nine, there were sporadic violence in the halls of
the high school, and in the spring of nineteen seventy,
Brainard High School had to be closed twice for a
(33:40):
few days each time because the violence between students was
becoming uncontrollable. At the end of the nineteen seventy school year,
the Board of Education voted to prohibit the display of
the Confederate flag at Brainard High School the following year.
This decision came about a year after the Supreme Court
ruling in the teen case out of Iowa. You may
(34:03):
have heard of what's called the Tinker test. Students in
public schools do still have their First Amendment rights. They
do have the right to free speech at school, but
schools can prohibit certain conduct that causes a substantial disruption
to the school environment. The Tinker case was about black
(34:24):
armbands worn by high schoolers to protest the Vietnam War.
Their silent protest and symbolic action with the black arm bands.
This didn't prevent anyone from learning. There was no substantial disruption.
Their armbands are free speech and they can wear them.
But if the police have to be called every day,
(34:47):
if people are setting things on fire, people are going
to the hospital, people are going to jail. The school
is literally closed because the violence is so bad. That's
a substantial disruption venting people from learning. And the school
board is within their rights to place some limitations on
what would otherwise be considered free expression. They can ban
(35:10):
the flag. Rod Melton was a senior in the fall
of nineteen seventy when the new policy went into effect.
It's noted in the appellate record that he'd been previously
disciplined at school for wearing a KKK sweatshirt during the
height of the unrest during his junior year, so he
(35:32):
was obviously not thrilled with the new policy. After several
days of being sent to the principal's office for refusing
to take off his Confederate flag jacket, Rod Melton was suspended.
His family filed a lawsuit alleging his freedom of speech
had been violated. They hired Jack Gershaw, and they lost.
(35:57):
Jack Kershaw took that case all the way to the
six circuit courts of appeals, and he lost. It was
the first time the federal court had ever considered the
First Amendment right to display Confederate flags in public schools,
and it was a decisive loss for the lost cause. Notably,
though not because it was racist. The ruling doesn't say
(36:23):
you can't be racist at school, or that a racist
environment is disruptive for black students. It's not about that.
The lower court ruling goes out of its way to
emphasize that. It is not about that. They are very
adamant about the content neutrality. It's really only permissible, in
the court's ruling to ban this symbol because of the
(36:46):
documented history of violent disruption that it had caused. And
we're not talking about throughout history or in general or
in Tennessee. They're saying very narrowly. At this specific high
school in the immediate preceding months, this symbol had caused violence.
(37:08):
That's the threshold. So it's a win for common sense,
but a narrow one. After losing the appeal, Kershaw recruited
the help of the ACLU to petition the Supreme Court,
but the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. By
(37:29):
the time Jack Kershaw represented James Earl Ray in nineteen
seventy seven, he was in his mid sixties. That's coming
up on retirement age for most people. His law practice
slowed to a trickle. In nineteen seventy nine, he made
a brief appearance in the press as the out of
state attorney for the Romanian princess arrested in New Jersey.
(37:51):
That's the incident we talked about last week. In the
early eighties, he occasionally appeared on local television programs in Nashville.
Couldn't find recordings of any of these appearances, but the
TV guide in the local paper describes things like a
televised debate on the merits of segregation. Another listing describes
(38:11):
him as local attorney avowed segregationist, So it's not like
it was any kind of secret what kind of lawyer
he'd been. In nineteen eighty three, when Jack was seventy,
he and his wife, Mary nul Kershaw, filed for bankruptcy.
I don't think they ever made much money practicing law,
(38:34):
but Mary's father had owned quite a bit of land.
She was from a very old Nationville area family, and
her family was quite wealthy. So based on old classified
ads that I could find and some articles about old
zoning meetings, I think Jack Kershaw made most of his
money building housing developments on land that his father in
(38:55):
law had owned. And with his father in law dead,
it seems like me maybe they weren't great stewards of
the money, so in nineteen eighty three they're bankrupt. I
can't get my hands on any of the original bankruptcy
case documents, but there are a handful of filings preserved
as part of the years the couple spent appealing the
(39:17):
court's orders. In this case, it seems like they were
less than cooperative, and a few years into the mess
they'd made for themselves, they tried to take legal action
against the court appointed bankruptcy trustee, alleging that she had
breached her fiduciary duty. A federal judge in Tennessee not
(39:40):
only ruled against the Kershaws, but was so put off
by their demand for four hundred thousand dollars in damages
that he ordered sanctions against them for their ongoing misconduct
in the case. It's pretty rare that I find anything
that I would call interesting or fun in a bankruptcy filing,
(40:04):
and I read a fair amount of them because I'm
really nosy. I mean, how else would I find out
critical information like how much money James Mason, that old
Nazi pervert who wrote Siege made when he was a
bag boy at kmart in two thousand and seven. It
was about nineteen thousand dollars if he were wondering. But
(40:24):
generally bankruptcy filings are not interesting. This nineteen eighty eight
opinion about Jack Kershaw's refusal to cooperate in his own
bankruptcy case, though it has some singers in it. Quote
the court finds that she that's the trustee here, has
been as diligent as she could be under the circumstances,
(40:47):
but has been prohibited from doing this because of the
debtor's actions. He is, in fact the master of his
own misfortune. I mean, what a turn of phrase of
his own misfortune. I think that goes from many areas
of his life. The opinion goes on to describe his
refusal to produce documents and information that the trustee needs
(41:10):
to do her job, and that he's withheld information from
the court about relevant state court proceedings against him. The
judge wrote that if there is any fault to be
found with the trustee's that she hadn't asked the court
sooner to just liquidate Kershaw's entire estate out from under him. Quote.
It is the court's opinion that she has shown job
(41:32):
like patience and has given the debtor far more time
and effort than the conduct of the debtor warrants. I mean,
that's that's incredible stuff, folks. You rarely get any kind
of fire from a bankruptcy judge. That's just fun. In
nineteen eighty nine, not long after that bankruptcy court ruling,
(41:55):
Jack's wife, Mary Noul Kershaw, died at the age of
seventy six. It's sad, I think, although maybe she wouldn't
that The only thing that comes up now if you
search her name are articles about hate groups. She wasn't
even in. That's her legacy her husband started a foundation
(42:17):
in her name, the Mary nol Kershaw Foundation, in nineteen
ninety two, a few years after she died. The nonprofit
organization has always been no matter what the doctor's lawyers,
judges in private equity fund presidents caught donating to it
are going to claim, it was always intended to fund
(42:37):
the activities of the hate group that Kershaw founded, the
League of the South. Tax documents show the fund paid
salaries to board members Jack Kershaw and Michael Hill. Coincidentally,
Jack Kershaw and Michael Hill co founded the League of
the South together, and Michael Hill has been the hate
group's president since its founding. Those same Form nine ninety
(43:02):
filings showed transfers of funds directly from the nonprofit to
the League of the South or allocated to fundly activities.
The Mary nol Kershaw Foundation functioned exactly as it was intended,
to allow tax exempt donations to a group advocating for
Southern secession and segregation for the formation of an all
(43:24):
white ethno state in the American South. It's hard to
find much information at all about Mary nol Kershaw, the
woman who went to law school with her husband and
got a law degree in nineteen sixty two. Her obituary
says she practiced law alongside her husband, but her name
is absent in decades of newspaper articles about his career,
(43:48):
and one newspaper article from the mid sixties describes her
as a stationary saleswoman at a department store. I mean,
like I said, maybe she wouldn't have a problem with it,
but I hate to see a woman a race from
her own life. All her name means now is another
rich guy got caught donating to a hate group, which
(44:11):
is really unfair because she was surely very racist in
her own right, and her story should be told too.
Oh well, I do think I'll circle back at some
point for a fun episode, maybe just a mini going
through some of those old tax documents that name the
Mary nol Kershaw Foundation's donors over the years. It'll come
(44:36):
up when we circle back to the League of the South,
but there are some interesting ones for my local listeners.
I was surprised to see a couple of Charlottesville residents
in there. I mean, this was years and years ago,
long before Unite the Right, but still small world, I guess.
(44:57):
I mean, more than anything, I'm kind of surprised. It
took me close to a decade to get around to
identifying every donor in those two decades of available tax documents,
given how much I love doing that kind of thing.
But better late than never. But it's the League of
the South. I wanted to end on because I want
(45:18):
to pick back up there, not next week. Next week
we're doing that Q and A episode. I'm taking a
few days off to celebrate my first wedding anniversary. I mean,
don't blame me. I probably would have worked right through it,
but my husband booked us the hotel room we stayed
in on our wedding night, and I think there's going
(45:38):
to be cake so Q and A next week. If
you're listening to this the absolute moment that it hit
your feet, I mean, if it's still Thursday morning, when
you're hearing me say this, you might still be able
to sneak your last minute questions in right under the wire.
It's worth a shot. You can email them to me
(45:58):
directly or post them on the show's subreddit. We'll be
back to our regularly scheduled guys the week after that.
I might pick right back up with the League of
the South, but we may have to do another brief
interlude so I can circle back to give you a
little color commentary from the Nazi chat rooms about the
recent allegations of paid informants in their ranks. There are
(46:21):
quite a few guys out there who did not appreciate
it when the President of the United States called their
sincerely held Nazi beliefs nothing but a big old hoax.
(46:45):
Weird Little Guys as a production of Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me Holly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Litcherman and Robert Evans. The
show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Dicker. You can email
me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
(47:06):
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys stop addit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys
Cool Zone Media. In January of nineteen seventy nine, there
was a minor fender bender outside of a parking garage
in downtown Nashville. The damage was nothing to get upset about,
less than fifty dollars worth, just a scratch, really, but
(00:24):
the driver responsible fled the scene. It's a thing of principle,
the traffic investigator told the Tennesseean, and the man whose
car had been hit swore out a warrant against the driver.
People saw it happen, they knew who he was. Gregory King,
a postal worker, says the man hit his car, swore
(00:47):
at him, and then drove off. Witnesses saw the man
back into King's car, opened his door to survey the damage,
and then hit the gas so hard his tire squeamiel
as he left the scene. And when the driver was
served with the warrant for leaving the scene of an accident,
he didn't deny it. Instead, he claimed he had to
(01:10):
leave for his own safety, saying, quote, he was an excited,
very angry black man. I don't know what kind of
weapons they carry, and I didn't intend to hang around
to find out. Nothing ever came of it. The newspaper
described him as a controversial Nashville attorney, citing his one
(01:34):
claim to fame his recent, albeit brief work for the
man who killed Martin Luther King Junior. But by nineteen
seventy nine, Jack Kershaw's time as an attorney was mostly
behind him, who was already an old man, And while
the newspaper in nineteen seventy nine was unwilling to call
the man a racist, it's hard to come up with
(01:54):
a more concise way to describe the legal career of
a man who only went to law school because he
thought it would help him stop integration. I'm Molly Conger,
and this is weird, little guys. I've made a bit
(02:28):
of a mess of things again. I mean, the story
got away from me, but that always happens. I'm not
sorry about that anymore. But between getting sick and getting
distracted by a side story about a princess, part three
of this story is showing up weeks after the first two.
Lucky for you, those first two parts are still there
(02:49):
on your podcast app if you want to revisit them.
And we are going to finish up with Jack Kershaw today,
but not in the way that I'd planned. I thought
this portion of his story would get deeper into his
actual legacy in this world, not the hideous racist statue
that got taken down a few years ago, but the
(03:11):
hate group that he founded. But I think that needs
a little more breathing room, especially given some recent developments.
I mean, if the President is going to go on
sixty minutes and accuse the Southern Poverty Law Center of
funding the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in twenty seventeen,
I think I am going to have to devote a
(03:33):
little more than a passing mention to some of the
known sources of funding for that Nazi rally. Jack Kershaw
was dead by twenty seventeen. He doesn't have much to
do with this, not directly, but the group he started
and the charitable fund he named after his dead wife
were very much still around. The SPLC may have paid
(03:56):
an informant, but to say that they wholly fund did
the event, that the event itself was a hoax put
on to make racists look bad, that's a gross mischaracterization.
It is revisionist history designed to excuse violent white supremacy.
I mean, of course, the president's a liar. He's always lying.
(04:19):
But this is a lie I know something about. So
I'm going to carve out a little time to talk
about that, just not today. This isn't a show about
current events. I feel like I say that all the time.
I'd like to have a real body of records to
look back on when I'm writing an episode. And it's
(04:39):
been kind of a relief, really these last two years,
being able to let breaking news just wash over me
rather than scramble to ride that wave before it passes
me by. I don't have to drop what I'm doing
this week to write that story right now. I can
finish writing this one, and I'll slot this week's current
(05:02):
events into their place and the history I'm writing when
I've had a little more time to let things settle
into place. I hope you don't mind waiting. I know
quite a few listeners have been anxious to hear my
take on the indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center
regarding their alleged payments to far right informants. So I
just wanted to let you know I hear you. I'm
(05:25):
thinking about it, and we will talk about it. I
would just rather offer you something thoughtful and contextualized than
an off the cuff hot take. So back to Jack
Jack Kershaw was a racist. I mean, you've probably guessed
that by now, it would be a rare guy on
(05:47):
this show who wasn't. And you can kind of infer
what sort of racial beliefs he had based on his
obsession with a confederacy. He loved the idea of the
ante bellum South so much much that he pretended to
have a Confederate admiral for a grandfather, a funny little
lie we uncovered in the first episode about him, And
(06:10):
it's hard to imagine someone who would lovingly sculpt a
twenty five foot tall statue of a clan wizard out
of bathtubs is someone who has normal views about black people.
You can guess that Jack Kershaw was racist. You can
assume that that might have had something to do with
his eagerness to represent Martin Luther King Junior's assassin. But
(06:34):
so far we've talked about his big, ugly statue and
the time he tricked a prison warden into letting Playboy
magazine polygraph and assassin. We haven't really talked about how
he came to be the man who did those things.
Jack Kershaw didn't graduate law school until nineteen sixty two,
(06:56):
a few months before his forty ninth birthday. It was
a late in life career change for a man who
studied geology while at Vanderbilt on a football scholarship, and
he worked in the arts after college. There are a
million reasons someone might pivot in midlife, but in Jack
Kershaw's case, there was just one Brown versus Board of Education.
(07:23):
He had to find some way to stop it. We've
brushed up against this piece of history before. I believe
it was the Raymond Turner episode recently that got into
the history of massive resistance a little bit, that Southern
strategy of resisting school desegregation after the Brown verse Board
of Education Supreme Court decision in nineteen fifty four and
(07:45):
the decision known as Brown two that came a year later.
That second decision ordered public schools to integrate, with the
maddeningly vague direction of doing it with all deliberate speed.
Kershaw was already engaged to some degree with extreme right
wing and segregationist politics in the late nineteen forties. He
(08:08):
was involved in efforts to get strom Thurmond on the
ballot in Tennessee as the Dixie Krat Party's candidate in
the nineteen forty eight presidential election. If the Dixiecrat Party
doesn't ring any bells, I wouldn't worry about it right now.
It's exactly what it sounds like, and it only existed
for a few months in nineteen forty eight. And perhaps
(08:30):
it was on that nineteen forty eight campaign that Jack
Kershaw forged his close friendship with the poet Donald Davidson.
Almost every source about Kershaw's life uncritically repeats his claim
that he was involved with something called the Fugitive Poets
during his time at Vanderbilt, and the fact that he
(08:51):
and Donald Davidson were so close in the fifties and
sixties seems to lend support to the possibility of that
being true. But the math doesn't work. The Fugitives were
a group of poets, literary critics, writers, and scholars who
published a literary magazine called The Fugitive at Vanderbilt University
(09:11):
in the nineteen twenties. Jack Kershaw was ten years old
when this was happening. He claimed he was involved in
the group, and the claim appears everywhere, and the only
source I found that points out that this is not
possible because the Fugitives disbanded in the late twenties and
(09:32):
Kershaw didn't enroll at Vanderbilt until nineteen thirty two. Was
the book Dynamite Nashville by Betsy Phillips. I only read
the portions of her book that I needed for this episode,
but I'm going to keep it out so I can
come back to it. She got the Nashville police to
reopen a seventy year old unsolved bombing case, and you know,
(09:54):
I can't resist the siren song of a well laid
out theory, but an unsolved clan bombing. I'm not just
saying that because I think she's a listener. I'm actually
looking forward to finishing that book. Point is, Jack Kershaw
was a football player and a geology major who showed
up at Vanderbilt after this group of influential literary critics
(10:15):
had mostly moved on, and Betsy's book is the only
source I could find where anyone questions the veracity of
that claim. So he's probably lying about being directly involved
with the original Fugitive poets, but the kernel of truth
is that he was after college and long after the
(10:37):
demise of the group, close to one of its founders,
Donald Davidson. Davidson was a founding member of the Fugitive Poets,
and he was still an English professor at Vanderbilt when
Kershaw was a student there. It's not clear, based on
the sources I could find, if they actually met when
Kershaw was a student in the thirties or if they
(10:59):
kept in time throughout the forties. But in nineteen forty
eight the pair worked on strom Thurman's presidential campaign together
in Tennessee, and in nineteen fifty five, Davidson and Kershaw
formed a relatively short lived group called the Tennessee Federation
for Constitutional Government. It's a vague sounding name, and that's intentional,
(11:25):
and there's not a lot of easily accessible information about
the group. A two thousand and nine article about desegregation
in Nashville by journalist John Egerton calls it a group
quote about which little is known except that it had
close ties to the White Citizens Councils and its chairman
was Vanderbilt professor Donald Davidson. And that's a reasonable description.
(11:49):
I mean, the article discusses their role in an ensuing conflict,
but it's not wrong to say that there's just not
an abundance of information about the group. In twenty fourteen,
historian Benjamin Houston published a transcript of an interview he'd
conducted with Jack Kershaw a few years before Kershaw died.
(12:11):
I'd been trying to piece together this group's motivations based
on snippets from newspaper articles from nineteen fifty six. So
it was so strange to see an old man's uncomfortably
candid recollection of the first hate group that he founded.
As he's looking back on his life at ninety years old.
(12:33):
When he was asked about the founding of the Tennessee
Federation for Constitutional Government, Kershaw said, quote, I was instrumental
in founding that organization, and we considered that it was
a very important question of the day. Our position, briefly
was that the government was burgeoning large in an unhealthy way,
and that if compulsory segregation was wrong, then compulsory integration
(12:55):
certainly is wrong. Because both positions involve freedom of association.
The judiciary and the country as a whole are still
struggling with that problem today. It's called affirmative action and
that sort of thing, and it amounts really to compulsory association,
same as it ever was. I guess this old racist
(13:15):
is saying what plenty of conservatives feel in the silence
of their hearts. Right, he's saying, yeah, we lost on segregation,
but this is the same fight. We have to fight
affirmative action, we have to fight DEI, we have to
fight diversity, we have to fight wokeness, we have to
fight whatever it's called today. And it's just a modern
iteration of the same decades long fight to return to
(13:39):
a fully segregated society. He is saying the same thing
in this two thousand and three interview as he said
to reporters in nineteen fifty five. His language has not
really changed. The whole interview is truly a fascinating record.
(13:59):
He told Houston it was not a collection of rednecks
by any means, which is the charge leveled at all
Southern organizations. There were school teachers, writers, lawyers, and housewives.
Of course, at a Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government meeting,
the discussion could be very illuminating and informed. So again
(14:22):
he's saying what these kinds of guys still say today. Right,
were a respectable institution, And everyone seems to agree that
the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government was a respectable organization.
We keep falling for the same trick. I mean, the
white citizens Councils existed so that respectable people who had
(14:45):
the same politics as clan members could organize in a
more respectable, middle class fashion. But if you look into
the history of the white Citizen Councils in the mid
twentieth century, there are a lot of cases where the
groups had more in common than just their ideas. They
often shared members. It was the same guys in different
(15:07):
outfits on different days of the week. And we have
the same thing here. The Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government
initially distanced itself from even the Citizens Councils, saying that
they were only interested in constitutional law and government overreach,
none of this nasty racial business. Right, So the Klan,
(15:30):
the Citizens Councils, the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, it's
all the same ideas and the same goals, but on
this spectrum of respectability. And so everyone is distancing themselves
from the guy who's a little bit more uncouth than
he is. But in many cases they're getting drinks together afterwards.
(15:54):
A nineteen sixty six article in the Tennessee Historical Quarterly,
reflecting on the still very recent history of desegregation in Tennessee,
notes that the Federation quite literally used the word respectable
to describe itself, was a group that appealed to respectable people.
(16:15):
A nineteen seventy one article in the same publication called
the group quote comparatively dignified and restrained in comparison to
other groups or violent agitators, this was a group of
polite people, educated people, people interested in peaceful, lawful action.
(16:36):
That action is not described as a form of violence,
right because violence, too exists on a spectrum of respectability,
and going to court to enforce violence is not seen
as participating in that violence. But this group, their professors
and businessmen, their attorneys and artists throughout gutter races. They're
(17:01):
not instigators. They're not brick throwers. They file for injunctions,
they don't start riots, and they tried to keep their
distance from those who did. Again, it's the same as
it ever was. The white power movement has always had
suits and boots, the street fighters and the paper pushers.
(17:26):
They need both. They denounce one another as traders and
wreckers and people who don't have the right ideas or
the right backbone, the right commitment. But deep down, the
ones who understand what they're doing, they know they need
each other. I think it was in one of the
American Third Position Party episodes a few months back. I
(17:49):
actually played a recording of a meeting where they were
both skinheads and racist professors who were members of the
same organization, and they said out loud, they articulated this idea.
They said, they need each other. They both have their
parts to play. This is such an important theme to
(18:12):
keep highlighting when we encounter it in these stories, because
we have to identify this pattern. We have to stop
believing them when they say we're the nice, respectable racists.
Don't worry about us. In that two thousand and three
(18:40):
interview recalling his involvement in this group in the nineteen fifties,
Kershaw said they weren't rabble rousers. They weren't there to
stir up trouble. Quote. We kept the discussion at an
adult level, informed adult level. They weren't like those other racists.
They had reason and philosophy and court orders. They weren't
(19:05):
like these nasty boys outside. There was an intellectual, reasoned racism.
He wouldn't even call it racism, to be honest. When
Benjamin Houston asked him how he felt about being accused
of being a racist, specifically in the context of his
gigantic sculpture of Nathan Bedford Forest, he said, quote, it
(19:27):
doesn't bother me. I'm used to stupidity. I didn't get offended.
I guess I'd be a little bit disappointed if they
didn't get a little bit outrageous and call me racist.
But yes, I can tell a difference between black and white.
If you are such a racist that you don't know
the difference between black and white, you're insulting your black
brother because he's different and he's proud of it and
(19:48):
he wants to develop that way. Let's not reply to
a racist. So it's more racist if you're not racist.
Hard to say what he thinks he means by that,
because this is the same man, bear in mind, who,
in another conversation about his big racist statue, famously said quote,
(20:11):
somebody needs to say a good word for slavery. The
Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government sort of fades out as
desegregation becomes a political inevitability. They failed, and Jack Kershaw
was willing to admit that in that two thousand and
(20:32):
three interview, Benjamin Houston asked him if he thought the
group had been effective. Well, we failed utterly, of course,
he said. Compulsory integration did occur. We were opposed to that.
We were effective in bringing to the forefront reasonable conversation,
civilized exchange on the subject, and perhaps prevented some more
(20:55):
rapid folks from stirring things up unnecessarily. And he refers
several times in that interview to a particular incident where
one of these more rabid folks stirred things up unnecessarily
against the will of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government,
(21:15):
and the incident he's referring to is the most famous
incident in the history of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government,
the Clinton desegregation crisis. By court order, schools in Anderson County, Tennessee,
would begin the nineteen fifty six school year without segregation.
(21:39):
Until that year, black students in Anderson County had to
take a bus half an hour to Knoxville if they
wanted to attend school, But that fall, twelve black students,
the Clinton twelve, as they came to be called, would
attend the previously all white Clinton High School. Just before
the school year began, John Casper showed up. We'll have
(22:03):
to circle back to Casper, because he is He is
a weird little guy, and I was very intrigued to
see that he drove straight to Clinton from the last
town where he'd been stirring up trouble over segregation. He
drove to Tennessee from Charlottesville, Virginia. I had no idea
that Casper was buzzing around Charlottesville in nineteen fifty six,
(22:27):
So I'm going to have to come back to that one.
But in August of nineteen fifty six, when he was
done causing problems in Charlottesville, John Casper showed up in Clinton, Tennessee.
He was, as you've guessed by now, a segregationist. He
was a clansman and a member of the White Citizens Council,
and he was bound and determined to cause problems in Clinton.
(22:53):
The Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government denounced John Casper as
a rabble rouser and an outside agitator, insisting that their
method of fighting desegregation in the courts was the only
proper way to go about it. But I kind of
think part of the problem is that they were just
a little bit sour that Casper got to Clinton first. Right,
(23:15):
they were in the city in a courtroom, filing motions,
and Casper was out there on the street riling up crowds,
getting headlines and make it a mess. The Federation absolutely
had planned to and attempted to and kind of did
(23:35):
hold rallies in the streets in Clinton, but because John
Casper got there first, tensions were already very high, and
riot police prevented Kershaw from giving his own rousing speech
to the screaming mobs. When rioting broke out over Laborty
weekend in nineteen fifty six, John Casper was arrested sixteen
(24:00):
others who were charged with violating a court order that
prohibited them from interfering with desegregation at Clinton High School.
The Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government refused to have anything
to do with Casper, and they placed most of the
blame for the riots on him, but they fundraised for
and organized the legal defense of the people they referred
to as the Clinton sixteen. Those sixteen people arrested for
(24:25):
violating the court order preventing them from causing disorder outside
the high school. Several people in the Clinton sixteen were
openly identified as members of White Citizens Councils and the
ku Klux Klan, the very kind of people the Federation
is pretending that it doesn't associate with or support. And
(24:47):
Jack Kershaw, as vice chairman of the Tennessee Federation for
Constitutional Government, was tasked with heading up this effort for
legal defense. Ultimately, those sixteen segregationists, Scott slaps on the
wrists they paid fines. In that two thousand and three interview,
Jack Kershaw recalls his role in this effort, saying, quote,
(25:09):
we had several distinguished lawyers in our group. I wasn't
a lawyer at the time, but I organized the law
defense for the Clinton sixteen charged with blowing up the school.
And isn't that an odd thing to say? The Clinton sixteen,
the sixteen segregationists that he organized a legal defense for.
(25:31):
The people he's talking about. They were arrested in nineteen
fifty six. They were arrested for violating a court order.
They were arrested for rioting outside of the school in
September of nineteen fifty six. That's what he's talking about.
That is the only thing he can possibly be talking about.
They went to court, they fought their cases and there
(25:54):
weren't any serious consequences. The Clinton sixteen were not charged
blowing up the school, but Clinton High School did get
blown up in nineteen fifty eight, two years later, and
no one was ever charged for blowing up that school.
(26:17):
We don't know who bombed Clinton High School, but it
sounds like Jack Kershaw did know. It was his experience
in the aftermath of the crisis in Clinton that showed
him how important lawyers were to the movement. He had
helped organize the lawyers, he set up the meetings, he
helped raise the funds, but that was all he could do,
(26:41):
and he wanted to do more, so he went to
law school kind of I mean no offense to graduates
of what is now known as the Nashville School of Law,
but when Kershaw attended, it was still called the Nashville
YMCA Night Law School, because that's what it was. It
(27:03):
was a part time program with night classes held in
least classrooms at the Nashville YMCA. To this day, the
school is not accredited by the American Bar Association, although
it does have the approval of the Tennessee Board of
Law Examiners, so graduates can take the bar exam and
practice law in Tennessee, but only in Tennessee. It's a
(27:28):
four year program, but based on the dates I could
pin down, it looks like it took Jack six years
to complete it. But he did eventually get his jd
and presumably he passed the bar in Tennessee. Jack and
his wife both graduated from the YMCA Night Law School
(27:49):
in nineteen sixty two. Throughout the nineteen sixties and into
the early seventies, he used that law degree to fight
tooth and nail to slow down integration. Newspapers are dotted
with mentions of him headlining rallies and towns all over Tennessee,
organizing white parents and white citizens councils to advocate against
(28:10):
integrated schools. As a leader in his local White Citizens
Council in Nashville and the executive secretary of the state
wide Citizens Council in Tennessee, he traveled all over the state,
riling up parents didn't want their kids to go to
integrated schools. One nineteen sixty three article describes a meeting
(28:30):
in Haywood County that opened with the reverend making a
biblical argument for segregation, followed by a rousing speech from
Kershaw urging them to take legal action. In nineteen seventy one,
at a rally in Nashville urging white parents to boycott
the public schools over the district's busing program, Kershaw told
parents that they had quote the right to self defense
(28:54):
and self preservation, adding rather ominously, quote, I will leave
it to your conscience to decide what to do. We
not only have the right, but the duty to stand
up for the well being of our children. And maybe
he was talking about the boycott, But the bit about
(29:15):
self defense makes me wonder if he's not talking about
something like what happened to the first school district he
ever organized in back in nineteen fifty six. He failed
then too. Black students attended Clinton High School that year.
But maybe someone felt it with self defense, self preservation,
(29:36):
even to protect white children from integration when they put
a hundred sticks of dynamite in that school two years later.
But maybe when he said that in Nashville he was
just talking about the boycott. I think the actual most
(30:07):
important case Jack Kershaw's legal career was one that he lost.
I was picking through newspapers, getting bored collecting these odds
and ends about busing cases and injunctions and petitions and
racist speeches and little town halls all over Tennessee. When
I stumbled across Jack Kershaw's name someplace interesting, I mean,
(30:29):
he was in a newspaper of sorts. It was a
newspaper we've talked about before. It was in a November
nineteen seventy one issue of The Thunderbolt, the official newspaper
of JB. Stoner's National States Rights Party. We talked about J. B.
Stoner pretty extensively in the Josephaul Franklin series. He was
(30:52):
a staunch segregationist and anti semite and a serial bomber.
I wonder if they knew each other, Jack Kershaw on JB. Stoner,
when I can't find any direct evidence that they did.
But the world of States rights politics in late nineteen
fifties Tennessee wasn't so big that they wouldn't have run
(31:12):
into one another. And the man who co founded the
National States Rights Party with Stoner in nineteen fifty eight,
racist chiropractor Ed Fields, was at the ride in Clinton
in nineteen fifty six, so they certainly had friends in common,
and they both at different points in time represented James
(31:33):
Earl Ray. It's a small world, so I wouldn't say
I was shocked to see Jack Kershaw's name in an
issue of The Thunderbolt, but I was excited and the
article was about his client, a young man named Rod Melton.
Melton had been suspended from Brainerd High School in Chattanooga
(31:56):
for refusing to take off a jacket with a Confederate
flag on it. God, it sounds so modern. Seems like
just yesterday we were arguing over whether kids can wear
Confederate flag shirts to school at Almrall County. Brainard High
School had banned the display of the Confederate flag starting
in the nineteen seventy school year. Brainard High School had
(32:18):
only been integrated for a few years, starting in nineteen
sixty six, and in nineteen sixty nine, the school's few
black students protested the school's use of Dixie as their
pep rally song and the use of the Confederate flag
as the school symbol. It escalated pretty quickly and it
(32:38):
got out of hand. It started with walkouts, black students
staging walkouts at pep rally's. Then huge numbers of white
students held their own walkouts to protest rumors that the
flag would be banned. A few black students rushed the
(32:58):
field during a football game tried to burn a Confederate
flag in the middle of the field. White residents, students,
their parents, and people who had nothing to do with
the school held rallies waving Confederate flags. Rocks were thrown,
fights broke out, Police were called, and in October of
(33:18):
nineteen sixty nine, the city of Chattanooga imposed a city
wide curfew for several nights to try to stop tensions
from boiling over. Throughout the fall and winter of nineteen
sixty nine, there were sporadic violence in the halls of
the high school, and in the spring of nineteen seventy,
Brainard High School had to be closed twice for a
(33:40):
few days each time because the violence between students was
becoming uncontrollable. At the end of the nineteen seventy school year,
the Board of Education voted to prohibit the display of
the Confederate flag at Brainard High School the following year.
This decision came about a year after the Supreme Court
ruling in the teen case out of Iowa. You may
(34:03):
have heard of what's called the Tinker test. Students in
public schools do still have their First Amendment rights. They
do have the right to free speech at school, but
schools can prohibit certain conduct that causes a substantial disruption
to the school environment. The Tinker case was about black
(34:24):
armbands worn by high schoolers to protest the Vietnam War.
Their silent protest and symbolic action with the black arm bands.
This didn't prevent anyone from learning. There was no substantial disruption.
Their armbands are free speech and they can wear them.
But if the police have to be called every day,
(34:47):
if people are setting things on fire, people are going
to the hospital, people are going to jail. The school
is literally closed because the violence is so bad. That's
a substantial disruption venting people from learning. And the school
board is within their rights to place some limitations on
what would otherwise be considered free expression. They can ban
(35:10):
the flag. Rod Melton was a senior in the fall
of nineteen seventy when the new policy went into effect.
It's noted in the appellate record that he'd been previously
disciplined at school for wearing a KKK sweatshirt during the
height of the unrest during his junior year, so he
(35:32):
was obviously not thrilled with the new policy. After several
days of being sent to the principal's office for refusing
to take off his Confederate flag jacket, Rod Melton was suspended.
His family filed a lawsuit alleging his freedom of speech
had been violated. They hired Jack Gershaw, and they lost.
(35:57):
Jack Kershaw took that case all the way to the
six circuit courts of appeals, and he lost. It was
the first time the federal court had ever considered the
First Amendment right to display Confederate flags in public schools,
and it was a decisive loss for the lost cause. Notably,
though not because it was racist. The ruling doesn't say
(36:23):
you can't be racist at school, or that a racist
environment is disruptive for black students. It's not about that.
The lower court ruling goes out of its way to
emphasize that. It is not about that. They are very
adamant about the content neutrality. It's really only permissible, in
the court's ruling to ban this symbol because of the
(36:46):
documented history of violent disruption that it had caused. And
we're not talking about throughout history or in general or
in Tennessee. They're saying very narrowly. At this specific high
school in the immediate preceding months, this symbol had caused violence.
(37:08):
That's the threshold. So it's a win for common sense,
but a narrow one. After losing the appeal, Kershaw recruited
the help of the ACLU to petition the Supreme Court,
but the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. By
(37:29):
the time Jack Kershaw represented James Earl Ray in nineteen
seventy seven, he was in his mid sixties. That's coming
up on retirement age for most people. His law practice
slowed to a trickle. In nineteen seventy nine, he made
a brief appearance in the press as the out of
state attorney for the Romanian princess arrested in New Jersey.
(37:51):
That's the incident we talked about last week. In the
early eighties, he occasionally appeared on local television programs in Nashville.
Couldn't find recordings of any of these appearances, but the
TV guide in the local paper describes things like a
televised debate on the merits of segregation. Another listing describes
(38:11):
him as local attorney avowed segregationist, So it's not like
it was any kind of secret what kind of lawyer
he'd been. In nineteen eighty three, when Jack was seventy,
he and his wife, Mary nul Kershaw, filed for bankruptcy.
I don't think they ever made much money practicing law,
(38:34):
but Mary's father had owned quite a bit of land.
She was from a very old Nationville area family, and
her family was quite wealthy. So based on old classified
ads that I could find and some articles about old
zoning meetings, I think Jack Kershaw made most of his
money building housing developments on land that his father in
(38:55):
law had owned. And with his father in law dead,
it seems like me maybe they weren't great stewards of
the money, so in nineteen eighty three they're bankrupt. I
can't get my hands on any of the original bankruptcy
case documents, but there are a handful of filings preserved
as part of the years the couple spent appealing the
(39:17):
court's orders. In this case, it seems like they were
less than cooperative, and a few years into the mess
they'd made for themselves, they tried to take legal action
against the court appointed bankruptcy trustee, alleging that she had
breached her fiduciary duty. A federal judge in Tennessee not
(39:40):
only ruled against the Kershaws, but was so put off
by their demand for four hundred thousand dollars in damages
that he ordered sanctions against them for their ongoing misconduct
in the case. It's pretty rare that I find anything
that I would call interesting or fun in a bankruptcy filing,
(40:04):
and I read a fair amount of them because I'm
really nosy. I mean, how else would I find out
critical information like how much money James Mason, that old
Nazi pervert who wrote Siege made when he was a
bag boy at kmart in two thousand and seven. It
was about nineteen thousand dollars if he were wondering. But
(40:24):
generally bankruptcy filings are not interesting. This nineteen eighty eight
opinion about Jack Kershaw's refusal to cooperate in his own
bankruptcy case, though it has some singers in it. Quote
the court finds that she that's the trustee here, has
been as diligent as she could be under the circumstances,
(40:47):
but has been prohibited from doing this because of the
debtor's actions. He is, in fact the master of his
own misfortune. I mean, what a turn of phrase of
his own misfortune. I think that goes from many areas
of his life. The opinion goes on to describe his
refusal to produce documents and information that the trustee needs
(41:10):
to do her job, and that he's withheld information from
the court about relevant state court proceedings against him. The
judge wrote that if there is any fault to be
found with the trustee's that she hadn't asked the court
sooner to just liquidate Kershaw's entire estate out from under him. Quote.
It is the court's opinion that she has shown job
(41:32):
like patience and has given the debtor far more time
and effort than the conduct of the debtor warrants. I mean,
that's that's incredible stuff, folks. You rarely get any kind
of fire from a bankruptcy judge. That's just fun. In
nineteen eighty nine, not long after that bankruptcy court ruling,
(41:55):
Jack's wife, Mary Noul Kershaw, died at the age of
seventy six. It's sad, I think, although maybe she wouldn't
that The only thing that comes up now if you
search her name are articles about hate groups. She wasn't
even in. That's her legacy her husband started a foundation
(42:17):
in her name, the Mary nol Kershaw Foundation, in nineteen
ninety two, a few years after she died. The nonprofit
organization has always been no matter what the doctor's lawyers,
judges in private equity fund presidents caught donating to it
are going to claim, it was always intended to fund
(42:37):
the activities of the hate group that Kershaw founded, the
League of the South. Tax documents show the fund paid
salaries to board members Jack Kershaw and Michael Hill. Coincidentally,
Jack Kershaw and Michael Hill co founded the League of
the South together, and Michael Hill has been the hate
group's president since its founding. Those same Form nine ninety
(43:02):
filings showed transfers of funds directly from the nonprofit to
the League of the South or allocated to fundly activities.
The Mary nol Kershaw Foundation functioned exactly as it was intended,
to allow tax exempt donations to a group advocating for
Southern secession and segregation for the formation of an all
(43:24):
white ethno state in the American South. It's hard to
find much information at all about Mary nol Kershaw, the
woman who went to law school with her husband and
got a law degree in nineteen sixty two. Her obituary
says she practiced law alongside her husband, but her name
is absent in decades of newspaper articles about his career,
(43:48):
and one newspaper article from the mid sixties describes her
as a stationary saleswoman at a department store. I mean,
like I said, maybe she wouldn't have a problem with it,
but I hate to see a woman a race from
her own life. All her name means now is another
rich guy got caught donating to a hate group, which
(44:11):
is really unfair because she was surely very racist in
her own right, and her story should be told too.
Oh well, I do think I'll circle back at some
point for a fun episode, maybe just a mini going
through some of those old tax documents that name the
Mary nol Kershaw Foundation's donors over the years. It'll come
(44:36):
up when we circle back to the League of the South,
but there are some interesting ones for my local listeners.
I was surprised to see a couple of Charlottesville residents
in there. I mean, this was years and years ago,
long before Unite the Right, but still small world, I guess.
(44:57):
I mean, more than anything, I'm kind of surprised. It
took me close to a decade to get around to
identifying every donor in those two decades of available tax documents,
given how much I love doing that kind of thing.
But better late than never. But it's the League of
the South. I wanted to end on because I want
(45:18):
to pick back up there, not next week. Next week
we're doing that Q and A episode. I'm taking a
few days off to celebrate my first wedding anniversary. I mean,
don't blame me. I probably would have worked right through it,
but my husband booked us the hotel room we stayed
in on our wedding night, and I think there's going
(45:38):
to be cake so Q and A next week. If
you're listening to this the absolute moment that it hit
your feet, I mean, if it's still Thursday morning, when
you're hearing me say this, you might still be able
to sneak your last minute questions in right under the wire.
It's worth a shot. You can email them to me
(45:58):
directly or post them on the show's subreddit. We'll be
back to our regularly scheduled guys the week after that.
I might pick right back up with the League of
the South, but we may have to do another brief
interlude so I can circle back to give you a
little color commentary from the Nazi chat rooms about the
recent allegations of paid informants in their ranks. There are
(46:21):
quite a few guys out there who did not appreciate
it when the President of the United States called their
sincerely held Nazi beliefs nothing but a big old hoax.
(46:45):
Weird Little Guys as a production of Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me Holly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Litcherman and Robert Evans. The
show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Dicker. You can email
me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
(47:06):
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys stop addit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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