“We kept the discussion at an adult level”: Jack Kershaw and the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government

Just off Interstate 65 south of Nashville, a small private park bedecked with Confederate flags surrounds a nearly thirty-foot-tall statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest astride his horse and waving a pistol. “He’s crying, ‘Follow me!’” explained the sculptor of the controversial artwork, Jack Kershaw, who would later brush off criticism about the piece by asserting that “Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery.” Photograph by Shaun Slifer, December 2009, Flickr.com (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

Just off Interstate 65 south of Nashville, a small private park bedecked with Confederate flags surrounds a nearly thirty-foot-tall statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest astride his horse and waving a pistol. “He’s crying, ‘Follow me!’” explained the sculptor of the controversial artwork, Jack Kershaw, who would later brush off criticism about the piece by asserting that “Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery.”

Kershaw was a notorious Nashville eccentric who bridged the 1950s era of “massive resistance” and present-day neo-Confederate activities in the South, particularly in helping found the League of the South. Born in Carthage, Missouri, on October 12, 1913, Kershaw played football at Vanderbilt before obtaining a law degree at the Nashville ymca’s night school. He was perhaps most notorious for serving as James Earl Ray’s attorney and advancing the idea that Ray was the dupe and scapegoat amid a wider conspiracy to assassinate Martin Luther King. The two later had a falling-out after Kershaw sold Ray’s story to Playboy magazine for $11,000. His previous activism in right-wing causes had centered most notably on his vice-chairmanship of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government (tfcg), the state’s foremost massive resistance group during the 1950s. Chaired by the Vanderbilt poet and Southern Agrarian Donald Davidson, the tfcg spoke to a sort of mannered segregationist attitude in Nashville and elsewhere that tried to subvert the racial change promised by the Brown v. Board decision to broader racially conservative principles. But the group’s approach was rather at odds with the violent contentiousness that occurred over school desegregation, particularly in Nashville. Later, Kershaw aided the Citizens’ Councils and was a reoccurring figure in Nashville’s racial history, making a citizen’s arrest of Black Power figure George Washington Ware in 1967 and, during the early 1970s, supporting the parents groups who mobilized against school busing. He died in September 2010.

What follows is an edited version of an interview with Jack Kershaw at his suburban Nashville house on June 30, 2003. In it, Kershaw assesses the tfcg in ways that illuminate his attitudes towards race and the concept of voluntary association. He discusses the tfcg as a group attempting to have more elevated conversations about segregation, in contrast to other groups formed by “the masses.” He also talks about his artwork and the regionalist basis of his artistic approach, as well as some general beliefs about race, culture, and southern history. Although Kershaw professes many usual segregationist clichés, the interview is important in displaying the relative continuities of attitudes held by those white southerners who mobilized against civil rights— beliefs all the more pernicious because of people like Kershaw who try to enshrine these beliefs even in the present day.

In His Own Words

Could you describe for me the Nashville of the 1950s, given that I’m an outsider both to Nashville and the 1950s?

Nashville in the 1950s was in the process really of becoming a city after having been a wartime town.¹ In the 1950s, this was about a five-hundred-acre farm where we sit and, as you can see when you drove up, it’s solidly filled with buildings and little houses and things. That’s progress, they tell me; I’m not too sure about that. There was, I think, a beginning flow toward the attitude of the 1960s, but it’d been in the South and in the American culture since the 1920s...