April 2, 2026 • 38 mins
Jack Kershaw created his most famous piece of art in his 80s. His lifelong passion for the arts had to take a backseat when he shifted his focus to becoming a professional racist during the fight against integration. He was doing it for his confederate ancestors, he would often say. But he was never very specific about who exactly his ancestors were...
The It Could Happen Here episode mentioned, originally aired 2/22/2024 -
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1ZQAqsxImsNGQUTzHGKhNp
Sources:
https://thesewaneepurple.org/2021/03/23/polk-sculpture-donated-by-white-supremacist-jack-kershaw/
https://thesewaneepurple.org/2021/03/22/polk-sculpture-removed-by-student-taken-to-archives/
https://meridiana.sewanee.edu/2022/04/30/a-year-later-a-letter-of-explanation/
https://www.moca.org/collection/work/unmanned-drone
https://religiondispatches.org/2025/10/28/swords-plowshares
https://segregationinamerica.eji.org/report/confederate-icongraphy.html
https://wpln.org/post/even-as-statue-forrest-still-draws-fire/
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/03/30/Ray-says-lawyer-hid-Playboy-fee/1722386312400/
The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, August 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvCjM1lPwg4
Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, October 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5b_-TZwQ0I
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Call Zone Media. One morning in March of twenty twenty one,
a small statue disappeared from a library on the campus
of the University of the South in Swanningtonnessee. The bust
of the university's founder, Confederate General Leonidas Polk, had been
(00:24):
sitting on a shelf in the library for nearly seventy years,
and then one morning it was just gone. It reappeared
twenty four hours later, undamaged and wrapped in a shopping
bag left on the porch outside of the university archives.
The student who left it there also left a note
(00:46):
explaining that they'd taken the bus down because they could
quote no longer sit by while these symbols of white
supremacies stare over my and my fellow students shoulders as
we pursue our education, The note continued, I have no
desire to destroy or damage the bust and plaque, as
that would sweep its history under the rug. It has
(01:08):
a place in the archives where it can be historically contextualized,
but has no place hanging above the heads of students
of the University of the South, And as it turned out,
the archivists did indeed need to provide some context for
the bust before it could be cataloged, they would need
(01:30):
to figure out where the item had come from in
the first place. They didn't actually know, the plaque didn't say.
A week later, the director of the university's archives told
the student newspaper, The Swanee Purple that she'd been horrified
to discover the providence of that bust. It had been
(01:53):
a gift from the man who made it, a man
whose entire life was shaped by his overwhelming desire to
preserve segregation. And this little bust was nothing compared to
his best known work, a twenty five foot tall monstrosity,
a wild eyed, gun wielding cartoonishly frightening rendering of Confederate
(02:17):
General Nathan Bedford forest made of melted, molded, and hacked
bits of old bath tubs and covered in gold leaf,
that anonymous student had unknowingly rid their university library of
a piece of racist art that had been sculpted by
the man who later created the world's ugliest Confederate statute.
(02:44):
I Molly Conger, and this is wear blue. Guys. I've
(03:05):
been thinking a lot about statues lately, and by lately,
I guess I mean the last decade or so. I
must confess I never gave them much thought before twenty sixteen.
I'm certainly not alone in that a lot of white
Southerners never really gave a second thought to the monuments
(03:26):
to slavery we were walking past every day. Why would
I worry about that larger than life roberty lea statue
outside the library? What does it matter to me if
my only option for renting out a meeting room at
that library is a room named in honor of the
man who loved the priest Civil War South so much
that he paid to put that statue outside. What difference
(03:48):
is it to me that if I want to pay
a parking ticket at the county Clerk's office, I have
to pass under the shadow of this commemoration of the
blood spilled in the fight to keep black people in bondage.
I mean, once you put it that way, it does
start to matter. You do start to notice. But before
anyone made me think about it, I didn't. I'm not
(04:13):
proud of that, obviously, but there it is, and I
know better now. And if you've already forgotten the waves
of fever pitched national discourse about those statues, think back
to when those waves crested in twenty fifteen, after the
(04:34):
Charleston church shooting, in twenty seventeen, after the Unite the
Right rally, in twenty twenty, after the murder of George Floyd,
three moments of terrifying violence, Violence that we all saw
on the news around the world, Violence that was undeniably
(04:56):
about race, violence in the name of white supreme see
violence carried out with the same intent, really as the
message the statues themselves were designed to send. Black people
should not feel safe. Black people are powerless. They don't belong.
They cannot exist safely in this world. They cannot move
(05:17):
around freely, they cannot worship, they cannot use public parks.
They are not served, nor are they protected by the
organs of the state. Putting a Confederate soldier outside the
courthouse sends that message, and a cop choking a black
man to death in broad daylight does too. It's not
(05:37):
about being overly sensitive or liberal snowflakes trying to control
the lives of Fox News viewers or whatever. It's about
whether or not our public squares and our public funds
are allowed to be used to violate the human rights
and dignity of our neighbors, that's all. And of course
(05:58):
thinking about Confederate monuments stopped being optional about a decade ago,
at least where I live. I've mentioned before that I'm
a longtime resident of Charlottesville, Virginia. Ten years ago, if
anyone thought of Charlottesville at all, they were probably thinking
about Monicello or the University of Virginia. We have a
(06:21):
pretty good hospital here. I mean, there was a strong
possibility if you thought about this place, you were thinking
about something to do with Thomas Jefferson. And maybe we're
close to getting back to that kind of reputation of
the name, conjuring to mind brick buildings and white columns
and scenic drives on the Blue Ridge Parkway. But for
(06:43):
a couple of years there people mostly thought of us
as the town that had that Nazi rally because we
tried to take down a statue of Roberty Lee fair enough,
and we did eventually take it down. It took a
few years of legal wrangling and a change in state law,
(07:04):
but in twenty twenty one, the city of Charlottesville finally
removed the Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson statues that
had stood downtown for close to a century. The story
of those statues is woven into the fabric of so
much of what I write about, because the Unite the
Right rally in twenty seventeen was the eventual consequence of
(07:26):
so many of the histories I've explored. But that isn't
actually the subject of today's episode. I've spent so many
years looking at and writing about those two statues, in particular,
that I was surprised at my own surprise when I
saw them in the news again recently. I'd sort of
(07:46):
let myself forget them for a moment, and I lost
track of their ongoing story. For those unfamiliar with Charlottesville's
Confederate statues, they were not those chief hollow mail order
reproductions that so many little towns in the South put
up in the early twentieth century. These were big custom projects,
(08:13):
so we didn't just put them in a landfill. The
Stonewall Jackson statue was sent to Los Angeles, where it's
currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art. In
a manner of speaking, anyway, the general and his horse
have been cut into pieces and reassembled at odd angles,
creating an unsettling piece called unmanned drone by American artist
(08:38):
Kara Walker. I've only seen photos, but it is odd.
It's probably supposed to make me feel uneasy. The Roberty
Lee statue, though, the one at the heart of the controversy,
really the one in the background of so many photos
of Nazis in our park, was destroyed. It was melted down,
(09:04):
and that bronze will come home again in some new form.
The Swords into Plowshares project, led by Charlottesville's Jefferson School
African American Heritage Center, was given custody of the statue
with the understanding that they would shepherd the process of
reimagining it, inviting artists to submit proposals to reshape the
(09:24):
statue itself, literally recasting the bronze into something new, something
we can be proud of. I interviewed doctor Julane Schmidt,
who is one of the leaders of this project, oh,
probably two years ago now for an episode of that
could happen here. I'll try and link that in the
show notes if you want to look back at that.
(09:46):
But in March of twenty twenty six, Swords into Plowshares
announced three finalists from the artist's proposals that were submitted,
and community engagement is currently under way to determine what's
next for that melted statue. All that to say, the
statues are back on my mind, and anytime statues are
(10:07):
back in the national discourse, somebody brings up my favorite one.
Now it's not my place to say that any Confederate
statue is acceptable. I mean, like I said, as a
white Southerner, I didn't think twice about them for a
(10:29):
very long time, and the harm they do is not
to me. And in the decades since I realized what
those statues represent and how they function in my community,
I've been pretty public about my view that they are,
in fact quite bad. I've been pepper sprayed and bloodied
(10:50):
by cops at several separate demonstrations against the Silent Sam
statue at the University of North Carolina and Chapel Hill.
I've tasted my fair share of chemical meat conditions in
the shadow of the statues on Richmond's Monument Avenue. I
had a year's long beef with a guy who called
himself the Confederate Avenger after he took a special interest
(11:12):
in Charlottesville statues. That guy was so invested in punishing
me for writing negatively about the statues that he did
genealogical research, found the cemetery where my mother's family has
a burial plot, and drove several hours to do a
(11:33):
little bit of light grave desecration in the vicinity of
my great grandmother's bones. So I'm pretty committed to my
belief that the statues and the people who support them
are no good. I mean, forget the night I spent
in jail during the twenty twenty uprising, that Confederate avenger guy,
keep my fucking car. I'm pretty serious when it comes
(11:57):
to my opinion that Confederate statue served no positive purpose
and are harmful in any community. But hear me out,
but I do have a little bit of a soft
spot for the funniest racist statue anyone has ever subjected
(12:18):
a community to. It's easier to say that now that
it's gone, maybe because it too was taken down a
couple of years ago. But if it is possible for
a statue of a Confederate general to be a silly
little joke, this is the only candidate. The artist envisioned
(12:41):
it as a monument to white supremacy, a massive silver
and gold symbol of the accomplishments of white Southerners, of
the value and glory of Southern heritage, and I guess
he ended up doing just that. It is. Oh, it's
(13:02):
so ugly. I mean, it's kind of phenomenal. Surely you've
seen a picture of it. If you've lived in or
traveled through Middle Tennessee in the last twenty five years
or so, you've probably seen it in person. It was
displayed on private property alongside I sixty five, just south
(13:22):
of Nashville. If you don't know what I'm talking about yet,
stop right now and look it up, the Nathan Bedford
Forest Statue. There are other monuments to the Confederate General
who was one of the first Clan wizards, but this
one's going to come up first, I promise you, and
(13:43):
you will know that you've got the right one. While
you're getting that picture pulled up, here are some reactions
to the site you're about to see. That aired on
TV in the fall of twenty seventeen during one of
those cycles of discourse about the monuments.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
We can't lose the beauty of things like this actual
statue of Confederate General and KKK Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford forest.
Apparently the clan was founded by a skirt wearing nutcrackers
riding wet lizards. That is just objectively terrifying, regardless of context.
He looks like if a nickel did cocaine. Some some
(14:23):
of these statues.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Stephen Colbert and John Oliver are telling the truth. The
statue is fucking wild. It is a bewildering sight. The
twenty five foot tall abomination depicts a rearing horse in
gold with its rider in silver. Right away, you might
(14:51):
be drawn to the frightening look on the man's face.
His mouth is open, but not in the way it
might be if he were mid battle cry coupled with
the eyes open wide and bulging slightly in their sockets,
followed by the realization that he isn't looking over his shoulder.
(15:13):
The angle of his head atop his neck. It isn't natural,
it isn't possible. Perhaps the mouth is locked in an
eternal grimace, a final moment of agony, as this man
is surely dying of a broken neck. Look closer, are
(15:33):
his eyes glowing? There are these terrible little blue marbles
breast into the gaping eye sockets. The longer you look,
the stranger it becomes The rider is holding a gun
in one hand and a sword in the other, but
(15:53):
the sword in his right hand is held as though
he's leading a cavalry charge forward, all while he's turned
almost all the way around to point the gun at
an unknown enemy directly behind him, resulting in the man's
arms being completely spread eagle. So what then, is he
holding the reins with if both of his hands are
(16:15):
full of weapons. Oh, don't worry, there are none. There
are no reins at all because the horse isn't wearing
a bridle. There's a saddle, but no stirrups. The rider's
feet are just dangling. Come to think of it, his
butt isn't even touching the saddle. Actually, he's sort of
(16:37):
raised up, but with nothing to bear down on. You
have to wonder how he's keeping his balance. Best I
can tell his only hope of staying on that horse,
which is, might I remind you, rearing up on its
oddly thick hind legs. Is the grip he's got with
his knees. They're sort of digging into the horse's shoulders
(16:59):
well in front of the skirt of the saddle. I mean,
look at the picture. If you've ever ridden a horse.
This doesn't look right to you. As a horse girl
myself in a long ago phase of my life, I'm
baffled by the physics of this. I've always had more
of a sense of adventure than actual sense. So when
(17:20):
I was a teenager, I taught a horse to reaar
on command because I thought it would be funny, and
I dug out an old photo of me demonstrating the
trick bareback, so I do have a reference image for
what I'm imagining here. And Nathan would have fallen off
that damn horse. That's all I'm saying. Staring at this
perplexing image, letting its impossible shapes wash over you, you'll
(17:45):
probably realize something else. It's so smooth, it's so shiny.
It's plastic. It's made of fucking plastic. How is that
even possible? The silver and gold colored parts of the
statue are silver and gold leaf pressed patchually onto a
(18:09):
fiberglass shell shaped over polyurethane foam blocks. The materials were
repurposed by the artist from things that just happened to
be on hand. The piece was commissioned by Nashville area
businessman Bill Doris, whose Aqua Bath company made specialty bathtubs
(18:30):
for the elderly. The statue is made of bathtubs. When
(18:51):
the statue went up in nineteen ninety eight, Bill Doris
told the Nashville Commercial Appeal that he decided to commission
the piece for display on his property next time to
the interstate because he was quote tired of the genocide
of Southern culture. It's a heritage issue with me, and
that's all it is, he said, distancing himself from unsavory
(19:14):
groups like the Clan or the Aryan Nations. In two thousand,
about a year and a half after the statue was unveiled,
Doris told the Tennessean that he had no idea who
had snuck onto his property to hang an effigy of
Abraham Lincoln from one of the flagpoles that surrounded the statue.
There were thirteen flagpoles encircling the statue, each one flying
(19:38):
the Confederate flag. The newspaper says the large sign reading
Ape Lincoln found next to the hanged effigy must have
been a reference to the former president's gangly appearance, which
seems like not the most likely explanation to me. Doris said,
(20:00):
whoever did it, he does know how they feel because
he feels the same way about Abraham Lincoln. He just
personally wouldn't have gone about expressing it this way. When
Doris died in twenty twenty, he left the statue to
the Battle of Nashville Trust, a nonprofit focused on preserving
and interpreting sites related to the eighteen sixty four Battle
(20:22):
of Nashville, but according to WKRN news.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
They didn't want it. The Battle of Nashville Trust released
a statement as to why they took down the controversial
statue of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest along I sixty
five yesterday. The group says they weren't even aware the
former owner, Bill Doris, left it to them in his
will until after he died last year. The statement said
(20:49):
they had several reasons as to why they don't want
to use it. That includes the facts that Forrest wasn't
present at the Battle of Nashville. The statue is ugly
and a blight.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
The statue was taken down in twenty twenty one and
remains disassembled in storage somewhere, with no plans to put
it back together. The statue itself is a fascinating object
worthy of a little story about how it came to
be there, and most stories about it have a couple
of lines about the artist, a man named Jack Kershaw.
(21:29):
The two facts you'll usually hear about Jack are that
he was briefly James Earl Ray's lawyer in nineteen seventy seven.
Remember that's the man who murdered Martin Luther King Junior.
And Kershaw was also a founding member of the neo
Confederate hate group the League of the South. And I
never gave it much thought beyond that, Sure, a guy
(21:51):
who founded a Confederate hate group wanted a Confederate statue,
But he sucked at art, so he made a hideous monstrosity.
What's there to think about? So I was surprised to
find that for as much as he loved racism, he
actually loved art first. This was far from his only sculpture.
(22:15):
John Carl Kershaw called Jack, was born in Joplin, Missouri,
in nineteen thirteen, to parents Ethel Norton Kershaw and William
Carl Kershaw called Carl. The family moved to Tennessee a
few years after Jack was born, and he attended Montgomery
Bell Academy and then Vanderbilt university where he studied geology
and played football. And I assumed, as I was making
(22:38):
my timeline that I would find that he attended law
school at this point, because I know he became a lawyer.
But that's not what happened. In the nineteen thirties. After
graduating with his degree in geology, he first pursued his
real passion art. He painted and sculpted. One article mentions
(23:02):
that he was well known for his award winning woodblock prints.
He was for several years the statewide supervisor in Tennessee
for the Federal Art Project, a new deal program that
funded the visual arts. When he registered for the draft
in nineteen forty, he wrote Art Center as his place
(23:24):
of employment. I'm sure the racism was always there, but
until he started working on strom Thurman's campaign in the
late forties, you could imagine maybe that he was a
nice young man who got a football scholarship, tried to
love geology to impress his father, but got a good
(23:44):
government job that gave him the freedom to pursue his
love of painting. And doesn't that sound nice? But then,
of course there's his sixty year career as a professional racist.
Now I had in mind for this to be a
quick story about a strange man in his ugly statue.
(24:07):
I did. I know. I always say that, but I
really meant it this time. I felt like we were
all due for a quick and straightforward one parter after
that three month ordeal with Joseph Paul Franklin, and I
swear we're gonna get out of this one in two
no matter what I have to cut, as long as
it's not the bit about Martin Luther King Junior's assassin
(24:29):
suing him for pocketing the eleven grand Playboy magazine paid
for the chance to interview his Klein in prison. That'll
be in there. This was supposed to be a fun
story about a racist lawyer who made a statue out
of old bathtubs. But as I was doing my eleventh
hour due diligence, sort of rounding out my timeline, crossing
(24:49):
my t's, dotting my eyes, you know, gathering some clips
and quotes and double checking my sources, I realized something.
I mean, I made what looked like an incredible discovery.
It couldn't be true. It didn't make sense. I had
to put everything aside, go back and recheck this, and
(25:10):
I did a couple of hours of genealogical research. It
couldn't be true. I triple checked. I missed my self
imposed deadline, having promised myself i'd finished writing before dinner,
but I had to go back. John Carl Kershaw Jack Kershaw,
(25:30):
co founder of the League of the South, a man
whose lasting legacy is this hideous Confederate statue, a symbol
of an entire life devoted to racism under the guise
of caring deeply about Southern heritage. Wasn't really a Southern
as he claimed, not by heritage anyway. He lied he
(25:54):
was a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, but
I can't find any evidence that he qualified for membership.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans requires genealogical proof that applicants
are descendants of someone who fought for the Confederacy during
the Civil War. I mean, maybe they make exceptions for
you if you're a particularly influential racist. I don't know.
(26:18):
Maybe theyre rules for collateral kinship are so broad that
it counts if your tenth cousin twice removed was a
Confederate soldier. I guess that's possible. Years ago, I briefly
considered applying for the Daughters of the Confederacy as a bit.
I don't know. I didn't do it, so I never
thought it all the way through. But I do have
(26:39):
genealogical evidence that I may direct descendant of a Confederate officer,
So I looked into it a bit. And I don't
think Jack qualified for membership. But even if he's got
some hazy collateral aunts cousins stepdad's brother's son kind of claim,
(26:59):
he would full online about being related to an Admiral
Kershaw of the Confederate Army. His obituary has this vague
sounding claim, one that he made often during his life,
that he was quote an heir of Admiral Kershaw CSA
of South Carolina. The CSA after his name means Confederate
(27:24):
States Army, so he's saying he is an heir of
an admiral in the Confederate Army. Now I'm not a
big military history above, but admiral is a naval rank,
and if he was a naval officer, it would be CSN,
not CSA Confederate States Navy. I do happen to know
(27:47):
that because my Confederate ancestor was in the Navy. And
the next problem here is there was no Admiral Kershaw,
not at all. But in terms of Confederate officers named
Kershaw from South Carolina, there was a General Joseph Kershaw
(28:09):
from South Carolina, and that seems to be what he's
trying to evoke here, and on its face that seems possible.
There aren't a ton of Kershaws today, and there is
a Kershaw County, South Carolina, and a town in Lancaster County,
South Carolina that's also called Kershaw, So I bet a
(28:29):
lot of Kershaws in the United States are from that
area the general was. Census data shows there are about
five thousand Kershaws in the US now, and the best
I can tell from the eighteen eighty census, there were
about twelve hundred then, and a lot of people with
that last name do have some degree of shared heritage
(28:53):
if you trace it all the way back to whichever
of their ancestors emigrated from England. So sure it seems
reasonable that he could be related to that general. And
the phrase an air of is pretty vague. He's not
claiming to be a direct descendant, that's fair, But in
(29:16):
interviews and in writings over the years. He very often,
very clearly uses the word grandfather. He's talking about a
grandfather who fought for the Confederacy. And who this grandfather
is and what he did, and whether or not he
died changes from telling to telling. Sometimes this imaginary Confederate
(29:41):
grandpa died bravely in battle, as in his description in
a nineteen ninety four letter to the editor in the Tennesseean.
He wrote in to take issue with an article about
Confederate flags. He didn't think they were taking the issue
seriously enough. He wrote, quote to attack the symbols under
which my grandfather gave his life. He's indeed not a
(30:03):
light matter. Three years later, in a nineteen ninety seven
article in the same newspaper, he describes a story his
grandfather told him when he was a child about what
it was like serving under Nathan Bedford Forest in the
Civil War. In two thousand and one, when the League
of the South was demanding Congress pass a bill that
(30:24):
would pay reparations to descendants of Southerners whose property was
destroyed by those evil Union troops during the Civil War,
Kershaw claimed he believed that the state of Tennessee owed
him millions of dollars because his grandfather had owned a
large plantation in the western portion of the state that
had been destroyed during the war. These things can't all
(30:47):
be true. His grandfather cannot have both died in the
war and told him stories about the war in the
nineteen twenties. His grandfather cannot be South Carolina plantation owner
Joseph Kershaw and the owner of a plantation in western Tennessee.
Confederate General Joseph Kershaw died in South Carolina in eighteen
(31:10):
ninety four at the age of seventy two. And more importantly,
he wasn't Jack Kershaw's grandpa, not at all. Jack Kershaw's
grandfather didn't serve in the Civil War, but he did
register for the draft. In eighteen sixty three in Illinois.
(31:34):
Jack Kershaw's paternal grandfather registered for the draft with the
Union Army. His father's entire family was from the North.
(31:58):
Jack Kershaw's father, William Carl Kershaw, who went by Carl,
was born in Bloomington, Illinois. Carl's father, Jack's grandfather, John
Wesley Kershaw, was also born in Illinois in eighteen thirty
eight to parents who had emigrated from England. In eighteen
(32:19):
ninety one, John Wesley Kershaw was described as one of
the wealthiest landowners in McLean County, Illinois. He owned about
nine hundred acres of farmland in Illinois until he sold
it and retired to some land in Iowa. He died
in nineteen twenty three, when his grandson Jack would have
been ten years old, and his obituary doesn't mention any
(32:39):
military service at all. I mean, the Kershaw family is
so completely and totally from Bloomington, Illinois that when Jack's dad, Carl,
returned home for a brief visit in nineteen oh five,
the Bloomington Weekly Pantograph ran a story about it that
opens with the line, mister Carl Kershaw, one of Bloomington's
(33:02):
best known young men, were turned for a visit to
his home on Tuesday evening after an absence of more
than a year. He'd graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University in
Bloomington a year earlier, and then spent a year working
for the US Geological Survey, and he was home for
a bit before starting a job in nearby Geneseo. And honestly,
(33:25):
there's not much on the other side of the tree either.
His mother Ethel Norton was born in Wyoming. Her father
was born in Tennessee, and it looks like his family
was from Henry County, in the western part of the state,
but Jack's maternal grandfather was born in eighteen fifty five,
(33:46):
making him far too young to have served in the war. J. T.
Norton studied law and left Tennessee for Wyoming, where he
eventually became the city attorney in Land of Wyoming. When
Ethel was nine, her mother died from complications of childbirth,
and J. T. Norton sent his daughter back to Tennessee
to live with an aunt. So Jack's mother may well
(34:09):
have grown up hearing about the Civil War from relatives
in western Tennessee, but her father didn't serve. It is
possible that some of the Nortons from Henry County served
in the Confederate Army, but it wouldn't have been a
direct relative, certainly not a grandfather. The stories he's telling
(34:32):
are not true. The only time he gives an actual
name for a Confederate ancestor, it's a man who doesn't exist,
but is probably meant to confuse you into thinking he
means General Joseph Kershaw to whom he is not related,
not directly, and not within the last four generations of
his lineage. If he had a strong claim to Confederate
(34:55):
heritage through his mother's father, the Nortons of Henry County,
why didn't he say that. Surely one of his mother's
father's cousins fought in the war. But he's so explicit
about it having been a Kershaw and it having been
his grandfather, and neither of those things can be true.
(35:16):
He made an entire career out of how much he
cared about the values his Confederate grandpa fought and died for,
But his grandpas were a rich farmer in Illinois and
a lawyer in Wyoming. The fact that he was a
member of multiple hate groups based entirely around Southern culture,
Southern identity, Southern heritage. He even founded one of those
(35:40):
groups himself, all while lying about even having the kind
of Southern heritage he claimed. It really exposes the lie,
doesn't it. Oh, it's heritage, not hate. It's about our culture,
it's about our ancestors. Bullshit, it isn't about heritage. Anyone
with half the sense God gave a goat can see that.
(36:00):
And I know it down to my bones that it's
the truth, because it is my heritage and I hate it.
He was drawn to those heritage groups because he knew
full well what that heritage talk was covered for. He
knew what he had in common with the other members
of those groups wasn't the uniforms their grandpas wore, but
the hate in their hearts. He was a segregationist. He
(36:24):
became a lawyer so he could be a better segregationist.
He longed for a return to the southern culture of
his imaginary Confederate grandpa because he didn't want to have
to look at black people. I really did finish most
of my research into his career in racism, but the
sudden realization that his commitment to lying about what it
(36:46):
means to have Southern heritage went so far as to
include lying about having Southern heritage made me laugh so
hard I couldn't continue. Would it have made more sense
narrative to reveal this at the end, Yeah, probably, But
(37:06):
I was going to burst if I didn't tell you
this the moment I discovered it. So you'll have to
wait until next week to hear about Jack's midlife decision
to go to the YMCA night law school so he
could wage legal warfare on integration. In the meantime, I
don't know. Just don't stare too deeply into those weird
(37:27):
blue eyes on that statue. Weird Little Guys as a
production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written
(37:50):
and recorded by me only conquer Our Executive producers are
Sophi Letterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by
the wildly talented Rory Gaigan. The theme music was composed
by Brad Dicker. You can email me at Weirdle Guys
Podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
but I probably won't answer. It's nothing personal. You can
exchange conspiracy theories with other listeners on the Weird Little
Guys Separate it. Just don't post anything that's going to
(38:13):
make you one of my Weird Little Guys.
Call Zone Media. One morning in March of twenty twenty one,
a small statue disappeared from a library on the campus
of the University of the South in Swanningtonnessee. The bust
of the university's founder, Confederate General Leonidas Polk, had been
(00:24):
sitting on a shelf in the library for nearly seventy years,
and then one morning it was just gone. It reappeared
twenty four hours later, undamaged and wrapped in a shopping
bag left on the porch outside of the university archives.
The student who left it there also left a note
(00:46):
explaining that they'd taken the bus down because they could
quote no longer sit by while these symbols of white
supremacies stare over my and my fellow students shoulders as
we pursue our education, The note continued, I have no
desire to destroy or damage the bust and plaque, as
that would sweep its history under the rug. It has
(01:08):
a place in the archives where it can be historically contextualized,
but has no place hanging above the heads of students
of the University of the South, And as it turned out,
the archivists did indeed need to provide some context for
the bust before it could be cataloged, they would need
(01:30):
to figure out where the item had come from in
the first place. They didn't actually know, the plaque didn't say.
A week later, the director of the university's archives told
the student newspaper, The Swanee Purple that she'd been horrified
to discover the providence of that bust. It had been
(01:53):
a gift from the man who made it, a man
whose entire life was shaped by his overwhelming desire to
preserve segregation. And this little bust was nothing compared to
his best known work, a twenty five foot tall monstrosity,
a wild eyed, gun wielding cartoonishly frightening rendering of Confederate
(02:17):
General Nathan Bedford forest made of melted, molded, and hacked
bits of old bath tubs and covered in gold leaf,
that anonymous student had unknowingly rid their university library of
a piece of racist art that had been sculpted by
the man who later created the world's ugliest Confederate statute.
(02:44):
I Molly Conger, and this is wear blue. Guys. I've
(03:05):
been thinking a lot about statues lately, and by lately,
I guess I mean the last decade or so. I
must confess I never gave them much thought before twenty sixteen.
I'm certainly not alone in that a lot of white
Southerners never really gave a second thought to the monuments
(03:26):
to slavery we were walking past every day. Why would
I worry about that larger than life roberty lea statue
outside the library? What does it matter to me if
my only option for renting out a meeting room at
that library is a room named in honor of the
man who loved the priest Civil War South so much
that he paid to put that statue outside. What difference
(03:48):
is it to me that if I want to pay
a parking ticket at the county Clerk's office, I have
to pass under the shadow of this commemoration of the
blood spilled in the fight to keep black people in bondage.
I mean, once you put it that way, it does
start to matter. You do start to notice. But before
anyone made me think about it, I didn't. I'm not
(04:13):
proud of that, obviously, but there it is, and I
know better now. And if you've already forgotten the waves
of fever pitched national discourse about those statues, think back
to when those waves crested in twenty fifteen, after the
(04:34):
Charleston church shooting, in twenty seventeen, after the Unite the
Right rally, in twenty twenty, after the murder of George Floyd,
three moments of terrifying violence, Violence that we all saw
on the news around the world, Violence that was undeniably
(04:56):
about race, violence in the name of white supreme see
violence carried out with the same intent, really as the
message the statues themselves were designed to send. Black people
should not feel safe. Black people are powerless. They don't belong.
They cannot exist safely in this world. They cannot move
(05:17):
around freely, they cannot worship, they cannot use public parks.
They are not served, nor are they protected by the
organs of the state. Putting a Confederate soldier outside the
courthouse sends that message, and a cop choking a black
man to death in broad daylight does too. It's not
(05:37):
about being overly sensitive or liberal snowflakes trying to control
the lives of Fox News viewers or whatever. It's about
whether or not our public squares and our public funds
are allowed to be used to violate the human rights
and dignity of our neighbors, that's all. And of course
(05:58):
thinking about Confederate monuments stopped being optional about a decade ago,
at least where I live. I've mentioned before that I'm
a longtime resident of Charlottesville, Virginia. Ten years ago, if
anyone thought of Charlottesville at all, they were probably thinking
about Monicello or the University of Virginia. We have a
(06:21):
pretty good hospital here. I mean, there was a strong
possibility if you thought about this place, you were thinking
about something to do with Thomas Jefferson. And maybe we're
close to getting back to that kind of reputation of
the name, conjuring to mind brick buildings and white columns
and scenic drives on the Blue Ridge Parkway. But for
(06:43):
a couple of years there people mostly thought of us
as the town that had that Nazi rally because we
tried to take down a statue of Roberty Lee fair enough,
and we did eventually take it down. It took a
few years of legal wrangling and a change in state law,
(07:04):
but in twenty twenty one, the city of Charlottesville finally
removed the Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson statues that
had stood downtown for close to a century. The story
of those statues is woven into the fabric of so
much of what I write about, because the Unite the
Right rally in twenty seventeen was the eventual consequence of
(07:26):
so many of the histories I've explored. But that isn't
actually the subject of today's episode. I've spent so many
years looking at and writing about those two statues, in particular,
that I was surprised at my own surprise when I
saw them in the news again recently. I'd sort of
(07:46):
let myself forget them for a moment, and I lost
track of their ongoing story. For those unfamiliar with Charlottesville's
Confederate statues, they were not those chief hollow mail order
reproductions that so many little towns in the South put
up in the early twentieth century. These were big custom projects,
(08:13):
so we didn't just put them in a landfill. The
Stonewall Jackson statue was sent to Los Angeles, where it's
currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art. In
a manner of speaking, anyway, the general and his horse
have been cut into pieces and reassembled at odd angles,
creating an unsettling piece called unmanned drone by American artist
(08:38):
Kara Walker. I've only seen photos, but it is odd.
It's probably supposed to make me feel uneasy. The Roberty
Lee statue, though, the one at the heart of the controversy,
really the one in the background of so many photos
of Nazis in our park, was destroyed. It was melted down,
(09:04):
and that bronze will come home again in some new form.
The Swords into Plowshares project, led by Charlottesville's Jefferson School
African American Heritage Center, was given custody of the statue
with the understanding that they would shepherd the process of
reimagining it, inviting artists to submit proposals to reshape the
(09:24):
statue itself, literally recasting the bronze into something new, something
we can be proud of. I interviewed doctor Julane Schmidt,
who is one of the leaders of this project, oh,
probably two years ago now for an episode of that
could happen here. I'll try and link that in the
show notes if you want to look back at that.
(09:46):
But in March of twenty twenty six, Swords into Plowshares
announced three finalists from the artist's proposals that were submitted,
and community engagement is currently under way to determine what's
next for that melted statue. All that to say, the
statues are back on my mind, and anytime statues are
(10:07):
back in the national discourse, somebody brings up my favorite one.
Now it's not my place to say that any Confederate
statue is acceptable. I mean, like I said, as a
white Southerner, I didn't think twice about them for a
(10:29):
very long time, and the harm they do is not
to me. And in the decades since I realized what
those statues represent and how they function in my community,
I've been pretty public about my view that they are,
in fact quite bad. I've been pepper sprayed and bloodied
(10:50):
by cops at several separate demonstrations against the Silent Sam
statue at the University of North Carolina and Chapel Hill.
I've tasted my fair share of chemical meat conditions in
the shadow of the statues on Richmond's Monument Avenue. I
had a year's long beef with a guy who called
himself the Confederate Avenger after he took a special interest
(11:12):
in Charlottesville statues. That guy was so invested in punishing
me for writing negatively about the statues that he did
genealogical research, found the cemetery where my mother's family has
a burial plot, and drove several hours to do a
(11:33):
little bit of light grave desecration in the vicinity of
my great grandmother's bones. So I'm pretty committed to my
belief that the statues and the people who support them
are no good. I mean, forget the night I spent
in jail during the twenty twenty uprising, that Confederate avenger guy,
keep my fucking car. I'm pretty serious when it comes
(11:57):
to my opinion that Confederate statue served no positive purpose
and are harmful in any community. But hear me out,
but I do have a little bit of a soft
spot for the funniest racist statue anyone has ever subjected
(12:18):
a community to. It's easier to say that now that
it's gone, maybe because it too was taken down a
couple of years ago. But if it is possible for
a statue of a Confederate general to be a silly
little joke, this is the only candidate. The artist envisioned
(12:41):
it as a monument to white supremacy, a massive silver
and gold symbol of the accomplishments of white Southerners, of
the value and glory of Southern heritage, and I guess
he ended up doing just that. It is. Oh, it's
(13:02):
so ugly. I mean, it's kind of phenomenal. Surely you've
seen a picture of it. If you've lived in or
traveled through Middle Tennessee in the last twenty five years
or so, you've probably seen it in person. It was
displayed on private property alongside I sixty five, just south
(13:22):
of Nashville. If you don't know what I'm talking about yet,
stop right now and look it up, the Nathan Bedford
Forest Statue. There are other monuments to the Confederate General
who was one of the first Clan wizards, but this
one's going to come up first, I promise you, and
(13:43):
you will know that you've got the right one. While
you're getting that picture pulled up, here are some reactions
to the site you're about to see. That aired on
TV in the fall of twenty seventeen during one of
those cycles of discourse about the monuments.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
We can't lose the beauty of things like this actual
statue of Confederate General and KKK Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford forest.
Apparently the clan was founded by a skirt wearing nutcrackers
riding wet lizards. That is just objectively terrifying, regardless of context.
He looks like if a nickel did cocaine. Some some
(14:23):
of these statues.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Stephen Colbert and John Oliver are telling the truth. The
statue is fucking wild. It is a bewildering sight. The
twenty five foot tall abomination depicts a rearing horse in
gold with its rider in silver. Right away, you might
(14:51):
be drawn to the frightening look on the man's face.
His mouth is open, but not in the way it
might be if he were mid battle cry coupled with
the eyes open wide and bulging slightly in their sockets,
followed by the realization that he isn't looking over his shoulder.
(15:13):
The angle of his head atop his neck. It isn't natural,
it isn't possible. Perhaps the mouth is locked in an
eternal grimace, a final moment of agony, as this man
is surely dying of a broken neck. Look closer, are
(15:33):
his eyes glowing? There are these terrible little blue marbles
breast into the gaping eye sockets. The longer you look,
the stranger it becomes The rider is holding a gun
in one hand and a sword in the other, but
(15:53):
the sword in his right hand is held as though
he's leading a cavalry charge forward, all while he's turned
almost all the way around to point the gun at
an unknown enemy directly behind him, resulting in the man's
arms being completely spread eagle. So what then, is he
holding the reins with if both of his hands are
(16:15):
full of weapons. Oh, don't worry, there are none. There
are no reins at all because the horse isn't wearing
a bridle. There's a saddle, but no stirrups. The rider's
feet are just dangling. Come to think of it, his
butt isn't even touching the saddle. Actually, he's sort of
(16:37):
raised up, but with nothing to bear down on. You
have to wonder how he's keeping his balance. Best I
can tell his only hope of staying on that horse,
which is, might I remind you, rearing up on its
oddly thick hind legs. Is the grip he's got with
his knees. They're sort of digging into the horse's shoulders
(16:59):
well in front of the skirt of the saddle. I mean,
look at the picture. If you've ever ridden a horse.
This doesn't look right to you. As a horse girl
myself in a long ago phase of my life, I'm
baffled by the physics of this. I've always had more
of a sense of adventure than actual sense. So when
(17:20):
I was a teenager, I taught a horse to reaar
on command because I thought it would be funny, and
I dug out an old photo of me demonstrating the
trick bareback, so I do have a reference image for
what I'm imagining here. And Nathan would have fallen off
that damn horse. That's all I'm saying. Staring at this
perplexing image, letting its impossible shapes wash over you, you'll
(17:45):
probably realize something else. It's so smooth, it's so shiny.
It's plastic. It's made of fucking plastic. How is that
even possible? The silver and gold colored parts of the
statue are silver and gold leaf pressed patchually onto a
(18:09):
fiberglass shell shaped over polyurethane foam blocks. The materials were
repurposed by the artist from things that just happened to
be on hand. The piece was commissioned by Nashville area
businessman Bill Doris, whose Aqua Bath company made specialty bathtubs
(18:30):
for the elderly. The statue is made of bathtubs. When
(18:51):
the statue went up in nineteen ninety eight, Bill Doris
told the Nashville Commercial Appeal that he decided to commission
the piece for display on his property next time to
the interstate because he was quote tired of the genocide
of Southern culture. It's a heritage issue with me, and
that's all it is, he said, distancing himself from unsavory
(19:14):
groups like the Clan or the Aryan Nations. In two thousand,
about a year and a half after the statue was unveiled,
Doris told the Tennessean that he had no idea who
had snuck onto his property to hang an effigy of
Abraham Lincoln from one of the flagpoles that surrounded the statue.
There were thirteen flagpoles encircling the statue, each one flying
(19:38):
the Confederate flag. The newspaper says the large sign reading
Ape Lincoln found next to the hanged effigy must have
been a reference to the former president's gangly appearance, which
seems like not the most likely explanation to me. Doris said,
(20:00):
whoever did it, he does know how they feel because
he feels the same way about Abraham Lincoln. He just
personally wouldn't have gone about expressing it this way. When
Doris died in twenty twenty, he left the statue to
the Battle of Nashville Trust, a nonprofit focused on preserving
and interpreting sites related to the eighteen sixty four Battle
(20:22):
of Nashville, but according to WKRN news.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
They didn't want it. The Battle of Nashville Trust released
a statement as to why they took down the controversial
statue of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest along I sixty
five yesterday. The group says they weren't even aware the
former owner, Bill Doris, left it to them in his
will until after he died last year. The statement said
(20:49):
they had several reasons as to why they don't want
to use it. That includes the facts that Forrest wasn't
present at the Battle of Nashville. The statue is ugly
and a blight.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
The statue was taken down in twenty twenty one and
remains disassembled in storage somewhere, with no plans to put
it back together. The statue itself is a fascinating object
worthy of a little story about how it came to
be there, and most stories about it have a couple
of lines about the artist, a man named Jack Kershaw.
(21:29):
The two facts you'll usually hear about Jack are that
he was briefly James Earl Ray's lawyer in nineteen seventy seven.
Remember that's the man who murdered Martin Luther King Junior.
And Kershaw was also a founding member of the neo
Confederate hate group the League of the South. And I
never gave it much thought beyond that, Sure, a guy
(21:51):
who founded a Confederate hate group wanted a Confederate statue,
But he sucked at art, so he made a hideous monstrosity.
What's there to think about? So I was surprised to
find that for as much as he loved racism, he
actually loved art first. This was far from his only sculpture.
(22:15):
John Carl Kershaw called Jack, was born in Joplin, Missouri,
in nineteen thirteen, to parents Ethel Norton Kershaw and William
Carl Kershaw called Carl. The family moved to Tennessee a
few years after Jack was born, and he attended Montgomery
Bell Academy and then Vanderbilt university where he studied geology
and played football. And I assumed, as I was making
(22:38):
my timeline that I would find that he attended law
school at this point, because I know he became a lawyer.
But that's not what happened. In the nineteen thirties. After
graduating with his degree in geology, he first pursued his
real passion art. He painted and sculpted. One article mentions
(23:02):
that he was well known for his award winning woodblock prints.
He was for several years the statewide supervisor in Tennessee
for the Federal Art Project, a new deal program that
funded the visual arts. When he registered for the draft
in nineteen forty, he wrote Art Center as his place
(23:24):
of employment. I'm sure the racism was always there, but
until he started working on strom Thurman's campaign in the
late forties, you could imagine maybe that he was a
nice young man who got a football scholarship, tried to
love geology to impress his father, but got a good
(23:44):
government job that gave him the freedom to pursue his
love of painting. And doesn't that sound nice? But then,
of course there's his sixty year career as a professional racist.
Now I had in mind for this to be a
quick story about a strange man in his ugly statue.
(24:07):
I did. I know. I always say that, but I
really meant it this time. I felt like we were
all due for a quick and straightforward one parter after
that three month ordeal with Joseph Paul Franklin, and I
swear we're gonna get out of this one in two
no matter what I have to cut, as long as
it's not the bit about Martin Luther King Junior's assassin
(24:29):
suing him for pocketing the eleven grand Playboy magazine paid
for the chance to interview his Klein in prison. That'll
be in there. This was supposed to be a fun
story about a racist lawyer who made a statue out
of old bathtubs. But as I was doing my eleventh
hour due diligence, sort of rounding out my timeline, crossing
(24:49):
my t's, dotting my eyes, you know, gathering some clips
and quotes and double checking my sources, I realized something.
I mean, I made what looked like an incredible discovery.
It couldn't be true. It didn't make sense. I had
to put everything aside, go back and recheck this, and
(25:10):
I did a couple of hours of genealogical research. It
couldn't be true. I triple checked. I missed my self
imposed deadline, having promised myself i'd finished writing before dinner,
but I had to go back. John Carl Kershaw Jack Kershaw,
(25:30):
co founder of the League of the South, a man
whose lasting legacy is this hideous Confederate statue, a symbol
of an entire life devoted to racism under the guise
of caring deeply about Southern heritage. Wasn't really a Southern
as he claimed, not by heritage anyway. He lied he
(25:54):
was a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, but
I can't find any evidence that he qualified for membership.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans requires genealogical proof that applicants
are descendants of someone who fought for the Confederacy during
the Civil War. I mean, maybe they make exceptions for
you if you're a particularly influential racist. I don't know.
(26:18):
Maybe theyre rules for collateral kinship are so broad that
it counts if your tenth cousin twice removed was a
Confederate soldier. I guess that's possible. Years ago, I briefly
considered applying for the Daughters of the Confederacy as a bit.
I don't know. I didn't do it, so I never
thought it all the way through. But I do have
(26:39):
genealogical evidence that I may direct descendant of a Confederate officer,
So I looked into it a bit. And I don't
think Jack qualified for membership. But even if he's got
some hazy collateral aunts cousins stepdad's brother's son kind of claim,
(26:59):
he would full online about being related to an Admiral
Kershaw of the Confederate Army. His obituary has this vague
sounding claim, one that he made often during his life,
that he was quote an heir of Admiral Kershaw CSA
of South Carolina. The CSA after his name means Confederate
(27:24):
States Army, so he's saying he is an heir of
an admiral in the Confederate Army. Now I'm not a
big military history above, but admiral is a naval rank,
and if he was a naval officer, it would be CSN,
not CSA Confederate States Navy. I do happen to know
(27:47):
that because my Confederate ancestor was in the Navy. And
the next problem here is there was no Admiral Kershaw,
not at all. But in terms of Confederate officers named
Kershaw from South Carolina, there was a General Joseph Kershaw
(28:09):
from South Carolina, and that seems to be what he's
trying to evoke here, and on its face that seems possible.
There aren't a ton of Kershaws today, and there is
a Kershaw County, South Carolina, and a town in Lancaster County,
South Carolina that's also called Kershaw, So I bet a
(28:29):
lot of Kershaws in the United States are from that
area the general was. Census data shows there are about
five thousand Kershaws in the US now, and the best
I can tell from the eighteen eighty census, there were
about twelve hundred then, and a lot of people with
that last name do have some degree of shared heritage
(28:53):
if you trace it all the way back to whichever
of their ancestors emigrated from England. So sure it seems
reasonable that he could be related to that general. And
the phrase an air of is pretty vague. He's not
claiming to be a direct descendant, that's fair, But in
(29:16):
interviews and in writings over the years. He very often,
very clearly uses the word grandfather. He's talking about a
grandfather who fought for the Confederacy. And who this grandfather
is and what he did, and whether or not he
died changes from telling to telling. Sometimes this imaginary Confederate
(29:41):
grandpa died bravely in battle, as in his description in
a nineteen ninety four letter to the editor in the Tennesseean.
He wrote in to take issue with an article about
Confederate flags. He didn't think they were taking the issue
seriously enough. He wrote, quote to attack the symbols under
which my grandfather gave his life. He's indeed not a
(30:03):
light matter. Three years later, in a nineteen ninety seven
article in the same newspaper, he describes a story his
grandfather told him when he was a child about what
it was like serving under Nathan Bedford Forest in the
Civil War. In two thousand and one, when the League
of the South was demanding Congress pass a bill that
(30:24):
would pay reparations to descendants of Southerners whose property was
destroyed by those evil Union troops during the Civil War,
Kershaw claimed he believed that the state of Tennessee owed
him millions of dollars because his grandfather had owned a
large plantation in the western portion of the state that
had been destroyed during the war. These things can't all
(30:47):
be true. His grandfather cannot have both died in the
war and told him stories about the war in the
nineteen twenties. His grandfather cannot be South Carolina plantation owner
Joseph Kershaw and the owner of a plantation in western Tennessee.
Confederate General Joseph Kershaw died in South Carolina in eighteen
(31:10):
ninety four at the age of seventy two. And more importantly,
he wasn't Jack Kershaw's grandpa, not at all. Jack Kershaw's
grandfather didn't serve in the Civil War, but he did
register for the draft. In eighteen sixty three in Illinois.
(31:34):
Jack Kershaw's paternal grandfather registered for the draft with the
Union Army. His father's entire family was from the North.
(31:58):
Jack Kershaw's father, William Carl Kershaw, who went by Carl,
was born in Bloomington, Illinois. Carl's father, Jack's grandfather, John
Wesley Kershaw, was also born in Illinois in eighteen thirty
eight to parents who had emigrated from England. In eighteen
(32:19):
ninety one, John Wesley Kershaw was described as one of
the wealthiest landowners in McLean County, Illinois. He owned about
nine hundred acres of farmland in Illinois until he sold
it and retired to some land in Iowa. He died
in nineteen twenty three, when his grandson Jack would have
been ten years old, and his obituary doesn't mention any
(32:39):
military service at all. I mean, the Kershaw family is
so completely and totally from Bloomington, Illinois that when Jack's dad, Carl,
returned home for a brief visit in nineteen oh five,
the Bloomington Weekly Pantograph ran a story about it that
opens with the line, mister Carl Kershaw, one of Bloomington's
(33:02):
best known young men, were turned for a visit to
his home on Tuesday evening after an absence of more
than a year. He'd graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University in
Bloomington a year earlier, and then spent a year working
for the US Geological Survey, and he was home for
a bit before starting a job in nearby Geneseo. And honestly,
(33:25):
there's not much on the other side of the tree either.
His mother Ethel Norton was born in Wyoming. Her father
was born in Tennessee, and it looks like his family
was from Henry County, in the western part of the state,
but Jack's maternal grandfather was born in eighteen fifty five,
(33:46):
making him far too young to have served in the war. J. T.
Norton studied law and left Tennessee for Wyoming, where he
eventually became the city attorney in Land of Wyoming. When
Ethel was nine, her mother died from complications of childbirth,
and J. T. Norton sent his daughter back to Tennessee
to live with an aunt. So Jack's mother may well
(34:09):
have grown up hearing about the Civil War from relatives
in western Tennessee, but her father didn't serve. It is
possible that some of the Nortons from Henry County served
in the Confederate Army, but it wouldn't have been a
direct relative, certainly not a grandfather. The stories he's telling
(34:32):
are not true. The only time he gives an actual
name for a Confederate ancestor, it's a man who doesn't exist,
but is probably meant to confuse you into thinking he
means General Joseph Kershaw to whom he is not related,
not directly, and not within the last four generations of
his lineage. If he had a strong claim to Confederate
(34:55):
heritage through his mother's father, the Nortons of Henry County,
why didn't he say that. Surely one of his mother's
father's cousins fought in the war. But he's so explicit
about it having been a Kershaw and it having been
his grandfather, and neither of those things can be true.
(35:16):
He made an entire career out of how much he
cared about the values his Confederate grandpa fought and died for,
But his grandpas were a rich farmer in Illinois and
a lawyer in Wyoming. The fact that he was a
member of multiple hate groups based entirely around Southern culture,
Southern identity, Southern heritage. He even founded one of those
(35:40):
groups himself, all while lying about even having the kind
of Southern heritage he claimed. It really exposes the lie,
doesn't it. Oh, it's heritage, not hate. It's about our culture,
it's about our ancestors. Bullshit, it isn't about heritage. Anyone
with half the sense God gave a goat can see that.
(36:00):
And I know it down to my bones that it's
the truth, because it is my heritage and I hate it.
He was drawn to those heritage groups because he knew
full well what that heritage talk was covered for. He
knew what he had in common with the other members
of those groups wasn't the uniforms their grandpas wore, but
the hate in their hearts. He was a segregationist. He
(36:24):
became a lawyer so he could be a better segregationist.
He longed for a return to the southern culture of
his imaginary Confederate grandpa because he didn't want to have
to look at black people. I really did finish most
of my research into his career in racism, but the
sudden realization that his commitment to lying about what it
(36:46):
means to have Southern heritage went so far as to
include lying about having Southern heritage made me laugh so
hard I couldn't continue. Would it have made more sense
narrative to reveal this at the end, Yeah, probably, But
(37:06):
I was going to burst if I didn't tell you
this the moment I discovered it. So you'll have to
wait until next week to hear about Jack's midlife decision
to go to the YMCA night law school so he
could wage legal warfare on integration. In the meantime, I
don't know. Just don't stare too deeply into those weird
(37:27):
blue eyes on that statue. Weird Little Guys as a
production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written
(37:50):
and recorded by me only conquer Our Executive producers are
Sophi Letterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by
the wildly talented Rory Gaigan. The theme music was composed
by Brad Dicker. You can email me at Weirdle Guys
Podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
but I probably won't answer. It's nothing personal. You can
exchange conspiracy theories with other listeners on the Weird Little
Guys Separate it. Just don't post anything that's going to
(38:13):
make you one of my Weird Little Guys.
Host
Molly Conger
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