Jack Kershaw, a segregationist lawyer and founder of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, utilized his late wife Mary Noel's charitable fund to funnel tax-exempt donations into the League of the South, an organization advocating for Southern secession and an all-white ethnostate. Despite Kershaw's career shift from geology to law after 1962 to oppose school integration following Brown v. Board of Education, his legacy remains complicated by Mary Noel's erasure from historical records despite her own legal credentials. The episode highlights how this foundation enabled financial support for white supremacy long before the Unite the Right rally, suggesting that systemic racism often hides behind charitable facades while specific donors, including future Charlottesville residents, quietly funded these extremist goals. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Guaranteed Human iHeart Podcast00:02:30
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
Hey, what's good, y'all?
You're listening to Learn the Hard Way with your favorite therapist and host, Keir Games.
This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing.
How many men carry a suit of armor?
It signals to the world that you're not to be played with.
And just because you have the capability, that does not mean that you need to.
Listen to Learn the Hard Way on the iHeart Radio app.
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally.
Faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What would you eat if you had to start over?
Real simple, poor man's, poor woman's food.
Black beans, chicken, rice, plantains.
On the podcast Eating While Broke, I sit down with celebrities, entrepreneurs, and creators as they revisit the meals they once relied on and the moments that shaped their journey.
Named Best Food Podcast at the 2026 iHeart. Podcast Awards.
The full season is available to binge right now.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Nashville Fender Bender History00:15:33
In January of 1979, there was a minor fender bender outside of a parking garage in downtown Nashville.
The damage was nothing to get upset about.
Less than $50 worth.
Just a scratch, really.
But the driver responsible fled the scene.
It's a thing of principle, the traffic investigator told the Tennessean.
And the man whose car had been hit swore out a warrant against the driver.
People saw it happen, they knew who he was.
Gregory King, a postal worker, says the man hit his car, swore at him, and then drove off.
Witnesses saw the man back into King's car, open his door to survey the damage, and then hit the gas so hard his tire squealed as he left the scene.
And when the driver was served with a warrant for leaving the scene of an accident, he didn't deny it.
Instead, he claimed he had to leave for his own safety, saying, He was an excited, very angry black man.
I don't know what kind of weapons they carry, and I didn't intend to hang around to find out.
Nothing ever came of it.
The newspaper described him as a controversial Nashville attorney, citing his one claim to fame, his recent, albeit brief, work for the man who killed Martin Luther King Jr.
But by 1979, Jack Kershaw's time as an attorney was mostly behind him.
He was already an old man.
And while the newspaper in 1979 was unwilling to call the man a racist, it's hard to come up with a more concise way to describe the legal career of a man who only went to law school.
Because he thought it would help him stop integration.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
I've made a bit of a mess of things.
Again.
I mean, the story got away from me, but that always happens.
I'm not sorry about that anymore.
But between getting sick and getting distracted by a side story about a princess, part three of this story is showing up weeks after the first two.
Lucky for you, those first two parts are still there on your podcast app if you want to revisit them.
And we are going to finish up with Jack Kershaw today, but not in the way that I'd planned.
I thought this portion of his story would get deeper into his actual legacy in this world.
Not the hideous racist statue that got taken down a few years ago, but the hate group that he founded.
But I think that needs a little more breathing room, especially given some recent developments.
I mean, if the president is going to go on 60 Minutes and accuse the Southern Poverty Law Center of funding the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, I think I'm going to have to devote A little more than a passing mention to some of the known sources of funding for that Nazi rally.
Jack Kershaw was dead by 2017.
He doesn't have much to do with this, not directly, but the group he started and the charitable fund he named after his dead wife were very much still around.
The SPLC may have paid an informant, but to say that they wholly funded the event, that the event itself was a hoax put on to make racists look bad, that's a Gross mischaracterization.
It is revisionist history designed to excuse violent white supremacy.
I mean, of course, the president's a liar.
He's always lying.
But this is a lie I know something about.
So I'm going to carve out a little time to talk about that.
Just not today.
This isn't a show about current events.
I feel like I say that all the time.
I'd like to have a real body of records to look back on when I'm writing an episode and.
It's been kind of a relief, really, these last two years, being able to let breaking news just wash over me rather than scramble to ride that wave before it passes me by.
I don't have to drop what I'm doing this week to write that story right now.
I can finish writing this one, and I'll slot this week's current events into their place in the history I'm writing when I've had a little more time to let things settle into place.
I hope you don't mind waiting.
I know quite a few listeners have been anxious to hear my take on the indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center regarding their alleged payments to far right informants.
So I just wanted to let you know I hear you, I'm thinking about it, and we will talk about it.
I would just rather offer you something thoughtful and contextualized than an off the cuff hot take.
So back to Jack.
Jack Kershaw was a racist.
I mean, you've probably guessed that by now.
It would be a rare guy on this show who wasn't.
And you can kind of infer what sort of racial beliefs he had based on his obsession with the Confederacy.
He loved the idea of the antebellum South so much that he pretended to have a Confederate admiral for a grandfather, a funny little lie we uncovered in the first episode about him.
And it's hard to imagine someone who would lovingly sculpt a 25 foot tall statue of a Klan wizard out of bathtubs is someone who has normal views about Black people.
You can guess that Jack Kershaw was racist.
You can assume that that might have had something to do with his eagerness to represent Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassin.
But so far, we've talked about his big ugly statue and the time he tricked a prison warden into letting Playboy magazine polygraph an assassin.
We haven't really talked about how he came to be the man who did those things.
Jack Kershaw didn't graduate law school until 1962, a few months before his 49th birthday.
It was a late in life career change for a man who studied geology while at Vanderbilt on a football scholarship.
And he worked in the arts after college.
There are a million reasons someone might pivot in midlife.
But in Jack Kershaw's case, there was just one Brown versus Board of Education.
He had to find some way to stop it.
We've brushed up against this piece of history before.
I believe it was the Raymond Turner episode recently that got into the history of massive resistance a little bit.
That Southern strategy of resisting school desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 and the decision known as Brown 2 that came a year later.
That second decision ordered public schools to integrate with the maddeningly vague direction of doing it with all deliberate speed.
Kershaw was already engaged to some degree.
With extreme right wing and segregationist politics.
In the late 1940s, he was involved in efforts to get Strom Thurmond on the ballot in Tennessee as the Dixie Crat Party's candidate in the 1948 presidential election.
If the Dixie Crat Party doesn't ring any bells, I wouldn't worry about it right now.
It's exactly what it sounds like, and it only existed for a few months in 1948.
And perhaps it was on that 1948 campaign that Jack Kershaw forged his close friendship.
With the poet Donald Davidson.
Almost every source about Kershaw's life uncritically repeats his claim that he was involved with something called the Fugitive Poets during his time at Vanderbilt.
And the fact that he and Donald Davidson were so close in the 50s and 60s seems to lend support to the possibility of that being true.
But the math doesn't work.
The Fugitives were a group of poets, literary critics, writers, and scholars who published a literary magazine called The Fugitive.
At Vanderbilt University in the 1920s.
Jack Kershaw was 10 years old when this was happening.
He claimed he was involved in the group, and the claim appears everywhere.
And the only source I found that points out that this is not possible because the fugitives disbanded in the late 20s and Kershaw didn't enroll at Vanderbilt until 1932 was the book Dynamite Nashville by Betsy Phillips.
I only read the portions of her book that I needed for this episode, but.
I'm going to keep it out so I can come back to it.
She got the Nashville police to reopen a 70 year old unsolved bombing case.
And you know, I can't resist the siren song of a well laid out theory about an unsolved Klan bombing.
I'm not just saying that because I think she's a listener.
I'm actually looking forward to finishing that book.
Point is, Jack Kershaw was a football player and a geology major who showed up at Vanderbilt after this group of influential literary critics had mostly moved on.
And Betsy's book is the only source I could find where anyone questions the veracity of that claim.
So he's probably lying about being directly involved with the original Fugitive Poets.
But the kernel of truth is that he was, after college and long after the demise of the group, close to one of its founders, Donald Davidson.
Davidson was a founding member of the Fugitive Poets, and he was still an English professor at Vanderbilt when Kershaw was a student there.
It's not clear, based on the sources I could find, if they actually met when Kershaw was a student in the 30s, or if they kept in touch throughout the 40s.
But in 1948, the pair worked on Strom Thurmond's presidential campaign together in Tennessee.
And in 1955, Davidson and Kershaw formed a relatively short lived group called the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government.
It's a vague sounding name, and that's intentional.
And there's not a lot of easily accessible information about the group.
A 2009 article about desegregation in Nashville by journalist John Egerton calls it a group, quote, about which little is known, except that it had close ties to the White Citizens Councils, and its chairman was Vanderbilt professor Donald Davidson.
And that's a reasonable description.
I mean, the article discusses their role in an ensuing conflict, but it's not wrong to say that.
There's just not an abundance of information about the group.
In 2014, historian Benjamin Houston published a transcript of an interview he'd conducted with Jack Kershaw a few years before Kershaw died.
I'd been trying to piece together this group's motivations based on snippets from newspaper articles from 1956.
So it was so strange to see an old man's uncomfortably candid recollection of the first.
Hate group that he founded, as he's looking back on his life at 90 years old.
When he was asked about the founding of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, Kershaw said, I was instrumental in founding that organization, and we considered that it was a very important question of the day.
Our position, briefly, was that the government was burgeoning large in an unhealthy way, and that if compulsory segregation was wrong, then compulsory integration certainly is wrong, because both positions involve freedom of association.
The judiciary and the country as a whole are still struggling with that problem today.
It's called affirmative action and that sort of thing.
And it amounts really to compulsory association.
Same as it ever was, I guess.
This old racist is saying what plenty of conservatives feel in the silence of their hearts, right?
He's saying, yeah, we lost on segregation, but this is the same fight.
We have to fight affirmative action.
We have to fight DEI.
We have to fight diversity.
We have to fight wokeness.
We have to fight whatever it's called.
Today, and it's just a modern iteration of the same decades long fight to return to a fully segregated society.
He is saying the same thing in this 2003 interview as he said to reporters in 1955.
His language has not really changed.
The whole interview is truly a fascinating record.
He told Houston, It was not a collection of rednecks by any means.
Which is the charge leveled at all Southern organizations.
There were school teachers, writers, lawyers, and housewives, of course.
At a Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government meeting, the discussion could be very illuminating and informed.
So, again, he's saying what these kinds of guys still say today, right?
We're a respectable institution.
And everyone seems to agree that the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government was a respectable organization.
We keep falling for the same trick.
I mean, the white citizens' councils existed so that respectable people who had the same politics as Klan members could organize in a more respectable middle class fashion.
But if you look into the history of the white citizen councils in the mid 20th century, there are a lot of cases where the groups had more in common than just their ideas.
They often shared members, it was the same guys in different outfits on different days of the week.
And we have the same thing here.
The Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government initially distanced itself from even the Citizens' Councils, saying that they were only interested in constitutional law and government overreach.
None of this nasty racial business.
Right?
So the Klan, the Citizens' Councils, the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, it's all the same ideas and the same goals, but on this spectrum of respectability.
Professors and Respectability Spectrum00:07:06
And so everyone is distancing themselves from the guy who's a little bit more uncouth.
Than he is.
But in many cases, they're getting drinks together afterwards.
A 1966 article in the Tennessee Historical Quarterly, reflecting on the then still very recent history of desegregation in Tennessee, notes that the Federation quite literally used the word respectable to describe itself, it was a group that appealed to respectable people.
A 1971 article in the same publication.
Called the group, quote, comparatively dignified and restrained in comparison to other groups or violent agitators.
This was a group of polite people, educated people, people interested in peaceful, lawful action.
That action is not described as a form of violence, right?
Because violence too exists on a spectrum of respectability, and going to court to enforce violence is not seen as participating in that violence.
But this group, they're professors and businessmen, they're attorneys and artists, they're not gutter racists, they're not instigators, they're not brick throwers.
They file for injunctions, they don't start riots, and they try to keep their distance from those who did.
Again, it's the same as it ever was.
The white power movement has always had suits and boots.
The street fighters, And the paper pushers.
They need both.
They denounce one another as traitors and wreckers and people who don't have the right ideas or the right backbone, the right commitment.
But deep down, the ones who understand what they're doing, they know they need each other.
I think it was in one of the American Third Position Party episodes a few months back, I actually played a recording of a meeting where there were both skinheads and racist professors.
Who were members of the same organization.
And they said out loud, they articulated this idea.
They said they need each other.
They both have their parts to play.
This is such an important theme to keep highlighting when we encounter it in these stories because we have to identify this pattern.
We have to stop believing them when they say, We're the nice, respectable racists.
Don't worry about us.
Welcome to my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way, with me, your host, and your favorite therapist, Keir Gaines.
And in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests.
I'm talking Trip Fontaine, Ryan Clark.
Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing and we're still chasing it and we don't know when we've done enough.
Because people scoreboard wise, life becomes about wins and losses.
Steve Burns, Dustin Ross, because you find it important to be a good person while you're here on earth.
Are you a good person because you're afraid?
Because that's two different intentions, bro.
Absolutely.
And that's two different levels of trust.
I want you to just really be a good person.
Join me, Keir Gaines, as we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure, and purpose on my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Learn the Hard Way, and listen now.
2%.
That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.
I'm Michael Easter.
And on my podcast, 2%, I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world.
I'll be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts and more to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry.
We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory.
We got it wrong.
Many of the problems that we are freaked out about in the world are the result of stress.
Put yourself through some hardships.
And you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person.
Listen to 2%, that's TWO%, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former Bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice in so-and-so, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern: two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Maranchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two never mess with her friends either.
We always say that trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Casper High Defense Claims00:11:16
In that 2003 interview, recalling his involvement in this group in the 1950s, Kershaw said they weren't rabble rousers.
They weren't there to stir up trouble.
Quote We kept the discussion at an adult level, informed adult level.
They weren't like those other racists.
They had reason and philosophy and court orders.
They weren't like these nasty boys outside.
Theirs was an intellectual, reasoned racism.
He wouldn't even call it racism, to be honest.
When Benjamin Houston asked him how he felt about being accused of being a racist, specifically in the context of his gigantic sculpture of Nathan Bedford Forrest, he said, It doesn't bother me.
I'm used to stupidity.
I didn't get offended.
I guess I'd be a little bit disappointed if they didn't get a little bit outrageous and call me racist.
But yes, I can tell a difference between black and white.
If you are such a racist that you don't know the difference between black and white, you're insulting your black.
Brother, because he's different and he's proud of it and he wants to develop that way.
Let's not reply to a racist.
So it's more racist if you're not racist.
Hard to say what he thinks he means by that.
Because this is the same man, bear in mind, who, in another conversation about his big racist statue, famously said, Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery.
The Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government.
Sort of fades out as desegregation becomes a political inevitability.
They failed.
And Jack Kershaw was willing to admit that.
In that 2003 interview, Benjamin Houston asked him if he thought the group had been effective.
Well, we failed utterly, of course, he said.
Compulsory integration did occur.
We were opposed to that.
We were effective in bringing to the forefront reasonable conversation.
Civilized exchange on the subject, and perhaps prevented some more rabid folks from stirring things up unnecessarily.
And he refers several times in that interview to a particular incident where one of these more rabid folks stirred things up unnecessarily, you know, against the will of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government.
And the incident he's referring to is the most famous incident in the history of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government.
The Clinton Desegregation Crisis.
By court order, schools in Anderson County, Tennessee, would begin the 1956 school year without segregation.
Until that year, black students in Anderson County had to take a bus half an hour to Knoxville if they wanted to attend school.
But that fall, 12 black students, the Clinton 12, as they came to be called, would attend the previously all white, Clinton High School.
Just before the school year began, John Casper showed up.
We'll have to circle back to Casper because he is a weird little guy, and I was very intrigued to see that he drove straight to Clinton from the last town where he'd been stirring up trouble over segregation.
He drove to Tennessee from Charlottesville, Virginia.
I had no idea that Casper was buzzing around Charlottesville in 1956, so.
I'm gonna have to come back to that one.
But in August of 1956, when he was done causing problems in Charlottesville, John Casper showed up in Clinton, Tennessee.
He was, as you've guessed by now, a segregationist.
He was a Klansman and a member of the White Citizens Council.
And he was bound and determined to cause problems in Clinton.
The Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government denounced John Casper as a rabble rouser and an outside agitator, insisting that their method of fighting desegregation in the courts. Was the only proper way to go about it.
But I kind of think part of the problem is they were just a little bit sour that Casper got to Clinton first.
Right?
They were in the city, in a courtroom, filing motions, and Casper was out there on the street, riling up crowds, getting headlines, and making a mess.
The Federation absolutely had planned to, and attempted to, and kind of did.
Hold rallies in the streets in Clinton.
But because John Casper got there first, tensions were already very high, and riot police prevented Kershaw from giving his own rousing speech to the screaming mobs when rioting broke out over Labor Day weekend in 1956.
John Casper was arrested, as were 16 others who were charged with violating a court order that prohibited them from interfering with desegregation at Clinton High School.
The Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government refused to have anything to do with Casper, and they placed most of the blame for the riots on him.
But they fundraised for and organized the legal defense of the people they referred to as the Clinton 16.
Those 16 people arrested for violating the court order, preventing them from causing disorder outside the high school.
Several people in the Clinton 16 were openly identified as members of white citizens' councils and the Ku Klux Klan.
The very kind of people the Federation is pretending that it doesn't associate with or support.
And Jack Kershaw, as vice chairman of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, was tasked with heading up this effort for legal defense.
Ultimately, those 16 segregationists got slaps on the wrist, they paid fines.
In that 2003 interview, Jack Kershaw recalls his role in this effort, saying, We had several distinguished lawyers in our group.
I wasn't a lawyer at the time, but I organized the law defense for the Clinton 16, charged with blowing up the school.
And isn't that an odd thing to say?
The Clinton 16, these 16 segregationists that he organized a legal defense for, the people he's talking about, they were arrested in 1956.
They were arrested for violating a court order.
They were arrested for rioting outside of the school in September.
Of 1956.
That's what he's talking about.
That is the only thing he can possibly be talking about.
They went to court, they fought their cases, and there weren't any serious consequences.
The Clinton 16 were not charged with blowing up the school, but Clinton High School did get blown up in 1958, two years later, and no one was ever charged.
For blowing up that school.
We don't know who bombed Clinton High School, but it sounds like Jack Kershaw did know.
It was his experience in the aftermath of the crisis in Clinton that showed him how important lawyers were to the movement.
He had helped organize the lawyers, he set up the meetings, he helped raise the funds, but that was all he could do.
And he wanted to do more.
So he went to law school.
Kind of.
I mean, no offense to graduates of what is now known as the Nashville School of Law.
But when Kershaw attended, it was still called the Nashville YMCA Knight Law School.
Because that's what it was a part time program with night classes held in leased classrooms at the Nashville YMCA.
To this day, the school is not accredited by the American Bar Association, although it does have the approval of the Tennessee Board of Law Examiners.
So graduates can take the bar exam and practice law in Tennessee, but only in Tennessee.
It's a four year program, but based on the dates I could pin down, it looks like it took Jack six years to complete it.
But he did eventually get his JD, and presumably he passed the bar in Tennessee.
Jack and his wife both graduated from the YMCA Knight Law School in 1962.
Throughout the 1960s and into the early 70s, he used that law degree to fight tooth and nail to slow down integration.
Newspapers are dotted with mentions of him headlining rallies in towns all over Tennessee, organizing white parents and white citizens councils to advocate against integrated schools.
As a leader in his local white citizens council in Nashville and the executive secretary of the statewide citizens council in Tennessee, he traveled all over the state, riling up parents who didn't want their kids to go to integrated schools.
One 1963 article describes a meeting in Haywood County that opened with a reverend making a biblical argument for segregation.
Followed by a rousing speech from Kershaw urging them to take legal action.
In 1971, at a rally in Nashville urging white parents to boycott the public schools over the district's busing program, Kershaw told parents that they had, quote, the right to self defense and self preservation.
Adding rather ominously, quote, I will leave it to your conscience to decide what to do.
We not only have the right, but the duty to stand up for the well being of our children.
And maybe he was talking about the boycott.
But the bit about self defense makes me wonder if he's not talking about something like what happened to the first school district he ever organized in back in 1956.
He failed then, too.
Black students attended Clinton High School that year.
But maybe someone felt it was self defense, self preservation, even, to protect white children from integration.
When they put 100 sticks of dynamite in that school two years later.
But maybe when he said that in Nashville, he was just talking about the boycott.
Newspaper Patterns in Little Towns00:04:25
Welcome to my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way, with me, your host, and your favorite therapist, Keir Gaines.
And in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests.
I'm talking Trip Fontaine, Ryan Clark.
Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing.
And we're still chasing it, and we don't know when we've done enough.
Because people scoreboard-wise, life becomes about wins and losses.
Steve Burns, Dustin Ross.
Because you find it important to be a good person while you're here on earth, or are you a good person because you're afraid?
Because that's two different intentions, bro.
Absolutely.
And that's two different levels of trust.
I want you to just really be a good person.
Join me, Keir Gaines, as we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure, and purpose on my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Learn the Hard Way, and listen now.
2%.
That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.
I'm Michael Easter, and on my podcast, 2%, I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world.
I'll be speaking with writers.
Researchers and other health and fitness experts, and more to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry.
We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory.
We got it wrong.
Many of the problems that we are freaked out about in the world are the result of stress.
Put yourself through some hardships, and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person.
Listen to 2%, that's TWO%, on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former Bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing Greg Gillespie and Michael Maranchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
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There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two never mess with her friends either.
We always say that trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to The Girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I think the actual most important case of Jack Kershaw's legal career is one that he lost.
Bankruptcy Ruling and Flags00:15:06
I was picking through newspapers, getting bored collecting these odds and ends about busing cases and injunctions and petitions and racist speeches and little town halls all over Tennessee when I stumbled across Jack Kershaw's name someplace interesting.
I mean, it was in a newspaper of sorts, it was a newspaper we've talked about before.
Who is in a November 1971 issue of The Thunderbolt, the official newspaper of J.B. Stoner's National States' Rights Party?
We talked about J.B. Stoner pretty extensively in the Joseph Paul Franklin series.
He was a staunch segregationist, an anti Semite, and a serial bomber.
I wonder if they knew each other, Jack Kershaw and J.B. Stoner.
I mean, I can't find any direct evidence that they did, but the world of states' rights politics in late 1950s Tennessee.
Wasn't so big that they wouldn't have run into one another.
And the man who co founded the National States' Rights Party with Stoner in 1958, racist chiropractor Ed Fields, was at the riot in Clinton in 1956.
So they certainly had friends in common.
And they both, at different points in time, represented James Earl Ray.
It's a small world.
So I wouldn't say I was shocked to see Jack Kershaw's name in an issue of The Thunderbolt.
But I was excited.
And the article was about his client, a young man named Rod Melton.
Melton had been suspended from Brainerd High School in Chattanooga for refusing to take off a jacket with a Confederate flag on it.
God, it sounds so modern.
Seems like just yesterday we were arguing over whether kids can wear Confederate flag shirts to school in Almaral County.
Brainerd High School had banned the display of the Confederate flag starting in the 1970 school year.
Brainerd High School had only been integrated for a few years, starting in 1966.
And in 1969, the school's few black students protested the school's use of Dixie as their pep rally song and the use of the Confederate flag as the school symbol.
It escalated pretty quickly and it got out of hand.
It started with walkouts black students staging walkouts at pep rallies.
Then, huge numbers of white students held their own walkouts to protest rumors that the flag would be banned.
A few black students rushed the field during a football game and tried to burn a Confederate flag in the middle of the field.
White residents, students, their parents, and people who had nothing to do with the school held rallies waving Confederate flags.
Rocks were thrown.
Fights broke out.
Police were called.
And in October of 1969, the city of Chattanooga imposed a citywide curfew.
For several nights to try to stop tensions from boiling over.
Throughout the fall and winter of 1969, there was sporadic violence in the halls of the high school.
And in the spring of 1970, Brainerd High School had to be closed twice for a few days each time because the violence between students was becoming uncontrollable.
At the end of the 1970 school year, the Board of Education voted to prohibit the display of the Confederate flag at Brainerd High School the following year.
This decision came about a year after the Supreme Court ruling in the Tinker case out of Iowa.
You may have heard of what's called the Tinker Test.
Students in public schools do still have their First Amendment rights.
They do have the right to free speech at school.
But schools can prohibit certain conduct that causes a substantial disruption to the school environment.
The Tinker case was about black armbands worn by high schoolers to protest the Vietnam War.
Their silent protest and symbolic action with the black armbands didn't prevent anyone from learning.
There was no substantial disruption.
Their armbands are free speech and they can wear them.
But if the police have to be called every day, if people are setting things on fire, people are going to the hospital, people are going to jail, the school is literally closed because the violence is so bad.
That's a substantial disruption.
That's preventing people from learning.
And the school board is within their rights to place some limitations on what would otherwise be considered free expression.
They can ban the flag.
Rod Melton was a senior in the fall of 1970 when the new policy went into effect.
It's noted in the appellate record that he'd been previously disciplined at school for wearing a KKK sweatshirt during the height of the unrest during his junior year.
So he was obviously not thrilled with the new policy.
After several days of being sent to the principal's office for refusing to take off his Confederate flag jacket, Rod Melton was suspended.
His family filed a lawsuit alleging his freedom of speech had been violated.
They hired Jack Kershaw, and they lost.
Jack Kershaw took that case all the way to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and he lost.
It was the first time the federal court had ever considered the First Amendment right to display Confederate flags in public schools, and it was a decisive loss for the lost cause.
Notably, though, not because it was racist.
The ruling doesn't say you can't be racist at school or that a racist environment is disruptive for black students.
It's not about that.
The lower court ruling goes out of its way to emphasize that it is not about that.
They are very adamant about the content neutrality.
It's really only permissible in the court's ruling to ban this symbol because of the Documented history of violent disruption that it had caused.
And we're not talking about throughout history or in general or in Tennessee.
They're saying very narrowly at this specific high school in the immediate preceding months, this symbol had caused violence.
That's the threshold.
So it's a win for common sense, but a narrow one.
After losing the appeal, Kershaw recruited the help of the ACLU to petition the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
By the time Jack Kershaw represented James Earl Ray in 1977, he was in his mid 60s.
That's coming up on retirement age for most people.
His law practice slowed to a trickle.
In 1979, he made a brief appearance in the press as the out of state attorney for the Romanian princess arrested in New Jersey.
That's the incident we talked about last week.
In the early 80s, he occasionally appeared on local television programs in Nashville.
I couldn't find recordings of any of these appearances, but the TV guide in the local paper describes things like a televised debate on the merits of segregation.
Another listing describes him as local attorney, avowed segregationist.
So it's not like it was any kind of secret what kind of lawyer he'd been.
In 1983, when Jack was 70, he and his wife, Mary Noel Kershaw, filed for bankruptcy.
I don't think they ever made much money practicing law.
But Mary's father had owned quite a bit of land.
She was from a very old Nashville area family, and her family was quite wealthy.
So, based on old classified ads that I could find and some articles about old zoning meetings, I think Jack Kershaw made most of his money building housing developments on land that his father in law had owned.
And with his father in law dead, it seems like maybe they weren't great stewards of the money.
So in 1983, they're bankrupt.
I can't get my hands on any of the original bankruptcy case documents, but there are a handful of filings preserved as part of the years the couple spent appealing the court's orders in this case.
It seems like they were less than cooperative.
And a few years into the mess they'd made for themselves, they tried to take legal action against the court appointed bankruptcy trustee.
Alleging that she had breached her fiduciary duty.
A federal judge in Tennessee not only ruled against the Kershaws, but was so put off by their demand for $400,000 in damages that he ordered sanctions against them for their ongoing misconduct in the case.
It's pretty rare that I find anything that I would call interesting or fun in a bankruptcy filing, and I read a fair amount of them because I'm really nosy.
I mean, How else would I find out critical information, like how much money James Mason, that old Nazi pervert who wrote Siege, made when he was a bag boy at Kmart in 2007?
It was about $19,000, if you were wondering.
But generally, bankruptcy filings are not interesting.
This 1988 opinion about Jack Kershaw's refusal to cooperate in his own bankruptcy case, though, has some zingers in it.
Quote, the court finds that she, that's the trustee here, has been as diligent as she could be under the circumstances, but has been prohibited from doing this because of the debtor's actions.
He is, in fact, the master of his own misfortune.
I mean, what a turn of phrase.
The master of his own misfortune.
I think that goes for many areas of his life.
The opinion goes on to describe his refusal to produce documents and information that the trustee needs to do her job.
And that he's withheld information from the court about relevant state court proceedings against him.
The judge wrote that if there is any fault to be found with the trustee, it's that she hadn't asked the court sooner to just liquidate Kershaw's entire estate out from under him.
Quote It is the court's opinion that she has shown Job like patience and has given the debtor far more time and effort than the conduct of the debtor warrants.
I mean, that's.
That's incredible stuff, folks.
You rarely get any kind of fire from a bankruptcy judge.
That's just fun.
In 1989, not long after that bankruptcy court ruling, Jack's wife, Mary Noel Kershaw, died at the age of 76.
It's sad, I think, although maybe she wouldn't, because the only thing that comes up now if you search her name are articles about hate groups she wasn't even in.
That's her legacy.
Her husband started a foundation in her name, the Mary Noel Kershaw Foundation, in 1992.
A few years after she died.
The nonprofit organization has always been, no matter what the doctors, lawyers, judges, and private equity fund presidents caught donating to it are going to claim, it was always intended to fund the activities of the hate group that Kershaw founded the League of the South.
Tax documents show the fund paid salaries to board members Jack Kershaw and Michael Hill.
Coincidentally, Jack Kershaw and Michael Hill co founded the League of the South together.
And Michael Hill has been the hate group's president since its founding.
Those same Form 990 filings show transfers of funds directly from the nonprofit to the League of the South or allocated to fund League activities.
The Mary Noel Kershaw Foundation functioned exactly as it was intended to allow tax exempt donations to a group advocating for Southern secession and segregation, for the formation of an all white ethnostate in the American South.
It's hard to find much information at all about Mary Noel Kershaw, the woman who went to law school with her husband and got a law degree in 1962.
Her obituary says she practiced law alongside her husband, but her name is absent in decades of newspaper articles about his career.
And one newspaper article from the mid 60s describes her as a stationary saleswoman at a department store.
I mean, like I said, maybe she wouldn't have a problem with it.
But I hate to see a woman erase from her own life.
All her name means now is another rich guy got caught donating to a hate group.
Which is really unfair because she was surely very racist in her own right, and her story should be told too.
Oh well.
I do think I'll circle back at some point for a fun episode, maybe just a mini episode.
Going through some of those old tax documents that named the Mary Noel Kershaw Foundation's donors over the years.
It'll come up when we circle back to the League of the South, but there are some interesting ones.
For my local listeners, I was surprised to see a couple of Charlottesville residents in there.
I mean, this was years and years ago, long before Unite the Right.
But still, small world, I guess.
I mean, more than anything, I'm kind of surprised it took.
Me close to a decade to get around to identifying every donor in those two decades of available tax documents, given how much I love doing that kind of thing.
But better late than never.
But it's the League of the South I wanted to end on, because I want to pick back up there.
Next Week Q&A Wrap Up00:04:27
Not next week.
Next week, we're doing that QA episode.
I'm taking a few days off to celebrate my first wedding anniversary.
I mean, don't blame me.
I probably would have worked right through it, but My husband booked us the hotel room we stayed in on our wedding night, and I think there's going to be cake.
So, QA next week.
If you're listening to this the absolute moment that it hit your feet, I mean, if it's still Thursday morning when you're hearing me say this, you might still be able to sneak your last minute questions in right under the wire.
It's worth a shot.
You can email them to me directly or post them on the show's subreddit.
We'll be back to our regularly scheduled guys the week after that.
I might pick right back up with the League of the South, but.
We may have to do another brief interlude so I can circle back to give you a little color commentary from the Nazi chat rooms about the recent allegations of paid informants in their ranks.
There are quite a few guys out there who did not appreciate it when the President of the United States called their sincerely held Nazi beliefs nothing but a big old hoax.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Littriman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Diggart.
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 about the show 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, what's good, y'all?
You're listening to Learn the Hard Way with your favorite therapist and host, Keir Gaines.
This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing.
How many men carry a suit of armor?
It signals to the world that you're not to be played with.
And just because you have the capability, that does not mean that you need to.
Listen to Learn the Hard Way on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends, Trust Me Bait, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing Greg Wesby and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens.
Finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What would you eat if you had to start over?
Real simple, poor man's, poor woman's food black beans, chicken, rice, plantains.
On the podcast Eating While Broke, I sit down with celebrities, entrepreneurs, and creators as they revisit the meals they once relied on and the moments that shaped their journey.
Named Best Food Podcast at the 2026 iHeart Podcast Awards.
The full season is available to binge right now.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.