Molly Conger investigates Jack Kershaw, the artist behind a 25-foot fiberglass Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest statue made from bathtubs near Tennessee's I-65. Kershaw, a neo-Confederate League of the South founder and former lawyer for James Earl Ray, fabricated his Southern lineage despite genealogical proof of Illinois and Wyoming roots. While discussing the statue's 2021 removal and Charlottesville's melted Robert E. Lee monument, the episode exposes how such symbols perpetuate white supremacy and segregation, revealing the deliberate harm inflicted by these false historical narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groben.
You were related to the phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones' Playing Along on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know Roald Dahl.
He thought of Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
In the new podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, I'll tell you that story and much, much more.
What?
You probably won't believe it either.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, because I was a spy.
Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on my new podcast, Mostly Human, I'll take you to some wild corners of the tech world.
I'm about to go on a date with an AI companion at a real world cafe right here in New York City.
There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you.
Mostly Human is your playbook for how tech can work for you.
Anyone can now be an entrepreneur, anyone can build an app, and it's very empowering.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
How could this have happened at City Hall?
Charlottesville Statues Explained00:15:59
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten and a mystery that may or may not have been political.
It may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Core Zone Media.
One morning in March of 2021, a small statue disappeared from a library on the campus of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.
The bust of the university's founder, Confederate General Leonidas Polk, had been sitting on a shelf in the library for nearly 70 years.
And then one morning, it was just gone.
It reappeared 24 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, explaining that they'd taken the bus down because they could, no longer sit by while these symbols of white supremacy 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 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 catalogued, they would need 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 Sewanee Purple, that she'd been horrified to discover the provenance of that bust.
It had been 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 25 foot tall monstrosity, a wild eyed, gun wielding, cartoonishly frightening rendering.
Of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, made of melted, molded, and hacked bits of old bathtubs 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 statue.
I'm Molly Conger, and this.
Is where the little guy is.
I've 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 2016.
I'm certainly not alone in that.
A lot of white Southerners never really gave a second thought to the monuments to slavery we were walking past every day.
Why would I worry about that larger than life Robert E. Lee 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 pre Civil War South so much that he paid to put that statue outside?
What difference 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 proud of that, obviously, but there it is.
And I know better now.
Waves of fever pitched national discourse about those statues.
Think back to when those waves crested.
In 2015, after the Charleston church shooting.
In 2017, after the Unite the Right rally.
In 2020, 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 About race.
Violence in the name of white supremacy, 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 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 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, 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 Monticello.
Or the University of Virginia.
We have a 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 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 Robert E. Lee.
Fair enough.
And we did, eventually, take it down.
It took a few years of legal wrangling and a change in state law, but in 2021, 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 2017. Was the eventual consequence of 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 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 cheap, hollow mail order reproductions that so many little towns in the South put up in the early 20th century.
These were big, custom projects.
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 Tara Walker.
I've only seen photos, but it is odd.
It's probably supposed to make me feel uneasy.
The Robert A. 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.
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 statue itself, literally recasting the bronze into something new, something we can be proud of.
I interviewed Dr. Jelaine Schmidt, who is one of the leaders of this project.
Oh, probably two years ago now for an episode of It Could Happen Here.
I'll try and link that in the show notes if you want to look back at that.
But in March of 2026, Swords into Plowshares announced three finalists from the artist's proposals that were submitted, and community engagement is currently underway to determine what's next for that melted statue.
All that to say, the statues are back on my mind.
And anytime statues are 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 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 by cops at several separate demonstrations against the Silent Sam statue at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
I've tasted my fair share of chemical munitions in the shadow of the statues on Richmond's Monument Avenue.
I had a years long beef with a guy who called himself the Confederate Avenger after he took a special interest 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 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 2020 uprising.
That Confederate Avenger guy keyed my fucking car.
I'm pretty serious when it comes to my opinion that Confederate statues serve 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 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 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 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 25 years or so, you've probably seen it in person.
It was displayed on private property alongside I 65 just south 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 gonna come up first, I promise you, and 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 2017 during one of those cycles of discourse about the monuments.
We can't lose the beauty of things like this actual statue of Confederate General and KKK Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Apparently, the clan was founded by skirt wearing nutcrackers riding wet lizards.
That is just objectively terrifying, regardless of context.
He looks like if a nickel did cocaine.
So, some of these statues can embrace people.
Stephen Colbert and John Oliver are telling the truth.
The statue is fucking wild.
It is a bewildering sight.
The 25 foot tall abomination depicts a rearing horse in gold with its rider in silver.
Right away, you might 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, the angle of his head atop his neck 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.
The Frightening Horseman Image00:02:50
Look closer.
Are his eyes glowing?
There are these terrible little blue marbles pressed 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 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 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 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, 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 I was a teenager, I taught a horse to rear 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 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 patchily onto a fiberglass shell shaped over polyurethane foam blocks.
The materials were repurposed by the artist from things that just happened to be on hand.
Plastic Statue Secrets Revealed00:04:29
The piece was commissioned by Nashville area businessman Bill Dorris, whose aqua bath company made specialty bathtubs for the elderly.
The statue is made of bathtubs.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Groben.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night.
Each morning, say you love me.
You know.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG.
But did you know he was also a spy?
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life.
His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans.
What?
And he was really good at it.
You probably won't believe it either.
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, the guy was a spy.
Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelts, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman?
And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film.
How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever?
And what darkness from his covert past seeped?
Into the stories we read as kids.
The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote.
Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10 10 shots, five, City Hall building.
A silver.40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeartPodcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened at City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducked.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots, get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of a flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you're trying to keep up with everything happening on and off the court, we've got you covered on the podcast, Flagrant and Funny.
You look at the top four number one seeds.
What do you think UCLA is going to do?
Break down that for me, my friend.
Obviously, UConn is the overwhelming favorite in this tournament, but I'll be honest, I think people are kind of sleeping on Texas.
Experts are suggesting that UCLA is the number one challenger to UConn, and that right after that would be Texas.
SNC is so deep and so Thinking just about everything.
It really is annoying.
So it's UCLA, Texas, South Carolina, LSU.
Only ones that could possibly upset UConn.
On Flagrant and Funny, we're giving our unfiltered takes on the biggest moments, the conversations everyone's having.
So whether your bracket is busted or you just want the latest on the tournament, we got you.
Listen to Flagrant and Funny with Carrie Champion and Jamel Hill on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Confederate Ancestor Claims00:13:08
Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeartWomen's Sports.
When the statue went up in 1998, Bill Dorris told the Nashville Commercial Appeal that he decided to commission the piece for display on his property next to the interstate because he was, 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 groups like the Klan or the Aryan Nations.
In 2000, 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 13 flagpoles encircling the statue, each one flying 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, 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 2020, he left the statue to the Battle of Nashville Trust.
A nonprofit focused on preserving and interpreting sites related to the 1864 Battle of Nashville.
But according to WKRN News, 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 65 yesterday.
The group says they weren't even aware the former owner, Bill Dorris, left it to them in his will until after he died last year.
The statement said 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.
The statue was taken down in 2021 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.
The two facts you'll usually hear about Jack are that he was briefly James Earl Ray's lawyer in 1977.
Remember, that's the man who murdered Martin Luther King Jr.
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 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.
John Carl Kershaw, called Jack, was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1913 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 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 1930s, after graduating with his degree in geology, he first pursued his real passion art.
He painted and sculpted.
One article mentions 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 1940, he wrote Art Center as his place of employment.
I'm sure the racism was always there, but until he started working on Strom Thurmond's campaign in the late 40s, 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 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 60 year career as a professional racist.
Now, I had in mind for this to be a quick story about a strange man and his ugly statue.
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 Jr.'s assassin suing him for pocketing the $11 grand Playboy magazine paid for the chance to interview his client 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 11th hour due diligence, sort of rounding out my timeline, crossing my T's, dotting my I's, 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 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 finish writing before dinner.
But I had to go back.
John Carl Kershaw, Jack Kershaw, 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.
He wasn't really a Southern as he claimed.
Not by heritage, anyway.
He lied.
He 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.
Maybe their rules for collateral kinship are so broad that it counts if your 10th 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 genealogical evidence that I'm a 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 aunt's cousin's stepdad's brother's son kind of claim, he was full on lying 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 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 buff, 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 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 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 lot of Kershaws in the United States are from that area.
The general was.
Census data shows there are about 5,000 Kershaws in the US now.
And, best I can tell from the 1880 census, there were about 1,200 then.
And a lot of people with that last name do have some degree of shared heritage 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 heir of, is pretty vague.
He's not claiming to be a direct descendant, that's fair.
But in 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 grandpa died bravely in battle, as in his description in a 1994 letter to the editor in the Tennessean.
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, To attack the symbols under which my grandfather gave his life is indeed not a light matter.
Three years later, in a 1997 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 Forrest in the Civil War.
In 2001, when the League of the South was demanding Congress pass a bill that 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 be true.
His grandfather cannot have both died in the war and told him stories about the war in the 1920s.
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 1894 at the age of 72.
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 1863 in Illinois.
Jack Kershaw's paternal grandfather registered for the draft with the Union Army.
His father's entire family was from the North.
Draft Registration Lies Exposed00:04:13
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leavey, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Groben.
You related to the phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me, you know.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know Roald Dahl.
The writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG.
But did you know he was also a spy?
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life.
His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans.
What?
And he was really good at it.
You probably won't believe it either.
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, I was a spy.
Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelts?
Played poker with Harry Truman?
And he had a long affair with a congresswoman.
And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film.
How did the secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever?
And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids?
The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote.
Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10 10 shots, five, City Hall building.
A silver.40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened at City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots, get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of a flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you're trying to keep up with everything happening on and off the court, we've got you covered on the podcast, Flagrant and Funny.
You look at the top four number one seeds.
What do you think UCLA is going to do?
Break down that for me, my friend.
Obviously.
UConn is the overwhelming favorite in this tournament.
But I'll be honest, I think people are kind of sleeping on Texas.
Experts are suggesting that UCLA is the number one challenger to UConn and that right after that would be Texas.
SNC is so deep and so thick in just about everything.
It really is annoying.
So it's UCLA, Texas, South Carolina, LSU.
Only ones that could possibly upset UConn.
On Flagrant and Funny, we're giving our unfiltered takes on the biggest moments, the conversations everyone's having.
So whether your bracket is busted or you just want the latest on the tournament, We got you.
Listen to Flagrant and Funny with Carrie Champion and Jamel Hill on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Fake Southern Heritage Uncovered00:05:12
Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeartWomen's Sports.
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 1838 to parents who had emigrated from England.
In 1891, John Wesley Kershaw was described as one of the wealthiest landowners in McLean County, Illinois.
He owned about 900 acres of farmland in Illinois until he sold it and retired to some land in Iowa.
He died in 1923 when his grandson Jack would have been 10 years old, and his obituary doesn't mention any 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 1905, the Bloomington Weekly Pantograph ran a story about it that opens with the line Mr. Carl Kershaw, one of Bloomington's best known young men, returned 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 U.S. Geological Survey.
And he was home for a bit.
Before starting a job in nearby Geneseo.
And honestly, 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 1855, 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 Lander, 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 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 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 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.
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 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, 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 cover 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 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 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.
Narratively Perfect Twist00:03:41
Would it have made more sense narratively to reveal this at the end?
Yeah, probably.
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 Knight 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 blue eyes on that statue.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conker.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groben.
You, he related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones' Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know Roald Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
In the new podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, I'll tell you that story and much, much more.
What?
You probably won't believe it either.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, I was a spy.
Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on my new podcast, Mostly Human, I'll take you to some wild corners of the tech world.
I'm about to go on a date with an AI companion at a real world cafe right here in New York City.
There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you.
Mostly Human is your playbook for how tech can work for you.
Anyone can now be an entrepreneur, anyone can build an app, and it's very empowering.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten and a mystery that may or may not have been political.
It may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.