Down Along with That Devil's Bones

by Connor Towne O'Neill

  The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education found that school segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The historic decision did not, however, include specific instructions to remedy the school systems’ problems. And the backlash was swift. Two weeks after the ruling in 1954, a Mississippi judge named Tom P. Brady delivered a speech that came to be known as the “Black Monday Speech,” in which he called for the popular election of Supreme Court justices, for a forty-ninth state to be created and given to African Americans, and most urgently, for each Southern state to form a “law-abiding” resistance movement to integration. That movement took shape as White Citizens Councils, known colloquially as country club Klans for their insistence on so-called above-board ways to resist integration. Why burn a cross when you could foreclose a mortgage?, the logic went. Copies of Brady’s “Black Monday” speech made their way across the South, and a year later there were 80,000 councilors in sixty-five Mississippi counties. Their motto was “states rights and racial integrity.”

  Kershaw’s Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government served as the state’s incarnation of the White Citizens Council and the only statewide organization resisting integration. When, in 1956, the Tennessee NAACP filed suit to force the state to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling, Kershaw mounted the grassroots resistance. He led campaigns in places like Clinton, where a week’s worth of agitating the local whites led to three nights of rioting, a siege of the county courthouse, and the deployment of the National Guard. The next year, during protests against the integration of Nashville’s schools, a protester detonated a bundle of dynamite at the Hattie Cotton Elementary School.

  Kershaw’s efforts with the TFCG were calamitous but, ultimately, unsuccessful. So in the 1960s, Kershaw went back to school, earning a degree from the Nashville YMCA Night School of Law. In the mid-1970s, he landed James Earl Ray as a client. Since almost immediately after submitting his guilty plea for the murder of Dr. King in 1968, Ray had maintained his innocence—that he had been involved in a conspiracy led by a mysterious blond-haired Latino man named Raul. By the time he hired Kershaw, Ray had cycled through a progression of lawyers, exhausting his appeals. So Kershaw, with no recourse in the courts, found a more creative way to represent his client. He ran with the Raul story. You can see him in TV news footage from 1977, after Ray had tried to escape from prison, dressed in a light suit, all collars and lapels, with a flop of white hair across his long forehead, promising to produce a picture of Raul should his client be granted a new trial. Short of that, he attempted to retry the case in the court of public opinion, arranging for his client to sit for an interview with Playboy magazine while taking a polygraph test. But the polygraph determined Ray was lying when he denied killing Dr. King—further weakening the credibility of his “Raul” theory. And when Ray discovered that Kershaw received $11,000 from the magazine for arranging the interview, he canned his lawyer.

  After that, Kershaw retreated from the public eye, but he reemerged in the mid-nineties as the founder of yet another white supremacist organization. In 1994, Kershaw, the history professor Michael Hill, and some forty other white Southerners convened in the conference room of an Alabama Best Western for a three-day summit on what they felt was the deterioration of Southern culture. Calling themselves the Southern League (they would later change it to the League of the South, after a complaint from a baseball league with the same name), they focused on the “Cultural, social, economic, and political independence and well-being of the Southern people.” Like the Agrarians before them, and the Confederates before them, the South they envisioned was a monolithic one, a white one. Their goal, as they put it in all sincerity, was to secede.

  The League’s secessionist bent is based on a dubious idea known as the “Celtic thesis”—an attempt to trace a line from the Celtic cultures of Central and Northern Europe on down to the European settlers of the seventeenth-century American South and into the present day. The idea being that “the South” constituted a distinct ethnic group and this was thus their homeland—as if to say, their blood, their soil. In the early years, the League acted as reactionary provocateurs—prototrolls, really—railing against the ascendant values of diversity and multiculturalism during the 1990s. As more and more people of color took to city council seats, city halls, state and national Congress, they presented counter-narratives to the white Southern identity in the centers of power—a second Reconstruction, brought on by the civil rights movement. As unreconstructed whites tried to cling to power and prerogative, so they clung to their myths and heroes. “Southerners who have studied American history and learned its lessons understand that the late unpleasantness is not over,” Michael Hill, a cofounder of the League, wrote in an op-ed in 1997. “Rather, it has shifted from the battlefield to the mind and the heart, and the stake is western civilization itself . . . Multiculturalism and diversity are merely the code words for the destruction of western Christian civilization.”

  While Hill penned letters, Jack Kershaw asked his friend William Dorris for some bath-fixture material. He was ready to sculpt his masterpiece. For eighteen months, he worked like a man possessed, finishing the higher portions of his statue with a cherry picker. Near the end, Ross remembered, Kershaw fell from the lift, knocking himself out cold. After a short hospitalization, he immediately returned to work. The urgency Kershaw felt to finish the Forrest statue might go some way toward explaining the subpar execution. The model looked really impressive, Ross insisted. But he was on deadline, plus Kershaw had inexplicably become obsessed with painted Roman statuary. That’s why, Ross told me, the finished statue looked like it could be on a mini-golf course.

  (When I bumped into Ross again, later that day, at the Panera by the interstate on-ramp, he again felt compelled to account for the statue’s ugliness. It was one of those uncanny “New South” moments where you could spend the morning in a workshop in the shadow of a Confederate statue then head up the road a mile for a chipotle-chicken panini in a strip mall. Ross didn’t seem to mind, though. He did want to stress, however, that from the point of view of Nashville Confederates, it was like a badge of honor—previously they didn’t have a Forrest statue and now they do.)

  Aesthetics aside, Dorris and Ross told me about how excited they were to dedicate the statue. “I was in the paper forty-three days in a row,” Dorris told me of the lead-up to the dedication, a note of pride ringing through his thin voice. “That’s better than Elvis.” Dorris explained that the original plan was to hold the dedication here, by the roadside—“He wanted to back traffic up to Alabama.” But the July day in 1998 proved too hot for them to hold the ceremony outdoors. Instead, the group decamped for the nearby Overton High School gymnasium. Even so, someone fainted. Michael Hill gave the keynote address, telling hundreds of sweaty Forrest admirers that “there can be no peace until we are a separate and free people again. The day of apologizing for the conduct of our Confederate ancestors is over.”

  They clearly enjoyed the provocation. Dorris told me that he and Kershaw used to sit in lawn chairs in front of the statue and wave at passing cars. The statue proved to be Kershaw’s piece de resistance. Tennessee schools had integrated despite Kershaw’s best efforts. James Earl Ray had canned him after the hijinks with Playboy. But radical organization and their ludicrous statue proved to be the right methods at the right moment to make a lasting point. Enter Nashville from the south and you enter under the banner of Forrest—a move as devious as the statue is ugly. A few years after the dedication, the League submitted a request to Congress for $5 billion dollars in reparations. Reparations, that is, to white landowners for the destruction of their land during the Civil War. The next year, when a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune pressed Kershaw about the Forrest statue, the artist responded: “Someone needs to say a good word for slavery.”

  But by the aughts, Kershaw was in his 90s; he wouldn’t live to see Confederate statues and the League march
into the center of the American consciousness. The Nashville-born novelist Madison Smartt Bell told me a story about going to visit Kershaw just before he died. Though he described Kershaw as a “reptilian white supremacist,” Bell was still drawn to some of his art: “The curious thing is that in spite of his truly reprehensible politics, some of the work he did was really good.” Walking through the old country club turned house, you’d pass through different eras and styles and idioms as you moved from room to room, Bell explained—WPA murals, sculpture, cubist portraits—“as if you had all the periods of Picasso in one house.” And Kershaw was an old acquaintance of the Bell family—he’d coached Bell’s father on his junior high tennis team, but his father had never seen Kershaw’s art, something Bell sought to remedy. They arranged a visit, but when father and son arrived one day in 2010, shortly after the devastating Nashville flood, the old country club turned house looked abandoned, fenced off by chain-link eighteen feet high. On the door was a FEMA notice, the ink turned slurry from the unrelenting downpour. Had Kershaw moved and neglected to mention it? They were about to leave when Bell noticed that the sections of chain-link were not bound; they could slip through the portions of fencing. Around back, a statue of Joan of Arc leaned under an overhang and both backdoors stood ajar. No sign of Kershaw, just a cat—“a big, fat, healthy, satanic cat.” Somebody was clearly feeding this cat, Bell realized, and so he poked his head in the house, calling again for Kershaw. Inside, the house was falling down. When Kershaw finally emerged, he wore only his underwear; he could not remember Bell, only his father and only from way back. Kershaw, the standard bearer for so many Neo-Confederate campaigns, died soon after. He left no descendants and no will.

  That was how William Dorris wound up with so much of Kershaw’s art. Upstairs in the workshop, Dorris showed Ross and me two of Kershaw’s paintings that he’d informally inherited. They are both huge, both nudes—the subjects are the wives of friends. Kershaw had given one as a gift but took it back when the husband tried to fight him because of it. The bigger one is displayed on a wall of a second-floor room that, in addition to the painting, is decorated with a bed and a series of monitors displaying security feeds of the statue. The painting is maybe seven feet long, the subject sprawled across a bed, the top sheet rumpled. Behind her and out the window is an intricate landscape, not unlike the background of the Mona Lisa, except it depicts a surreal Southwest landscape. Bell was right: The painting is of a higher quality than you’d expect from looking at the Forrest statue.

  After we finished our tour, Dorris’s phone rang. Apparently there was a situation at the Forrest Boyhood Home, down the highway in Chapel Hill, Tennessee, maintained by the local Sons of Confederate Veterans camp. To get it up to code so they could hold weddings there, someone had installed a handrail on the back porch—a big, anachronistic no-no. Dorris told me how glad he was to get off the committee in charge of such things, but he still got called about it. A beat of silence. Then: “Now that I’m mostly blind, I just sit around and wait for God.”

  Fifteen

  Same as It Ever Was

  Jack Kershaw was born fifty years after the Civil War ended, but had enlisted in many of the subsequent proxy wars fought over its meaning. For Kershaw, it was a civilian struggle—the battle fields now courtrooms, classrooms, roadsides—but the aim was still the same: to maintain white supremacy as a central structuring force in American life. Call it a cold Civil War. In the months after my visit to his grotesque Forrest statue, however, I began to feel as though that cold Civil War was smoldering back to life. Hate crimes had tripled the day after Donald Trump’s election and continued to occur with increased regularity in the following weeks and months. At the University of Alabama, someone wrote “Trump 2016 Kill the N------” in Sharpie on a bathroom door. I published a letter in the state’s major online news outlet calling on the university to be more proactive about its toxic racial climate, and in response, I received intimidating messages and threats, some of them coming from a commentator calling himself “Bombingham.” White nationalists, emboldened by the president’s racist rhetoric and retweets, were reaching larger and larger audiences and offering “Sieg heils” to him. In Berkeley, far-right groups brawled with the anti-fascist group Antifa. Battles over Confederate monuments escalated, drawing similar confrontations between armed militias and black-clad Antifa members in cities such as St. Louis, Houston, and New Orleans. By the time the showrunners from the television series Game of Thrones announced they were working on a new project, set in a future in which the Confederacy had won the Civil War, it seemed inconceivable that their fiction could be stranger than the truth we were then living.

  It was amid these hostilities that I headed back up I-65 to visit another Forrest landmark in Nashville. One that pointed to the origins of this cold Civil War and that served as a reminder that although white nationalism seemed to be reemerging, in truth it had never really gone away. One that allowed me to feel the deeper pull of the tensions now threatening to tear the country apart and that provided a reference point against which I could chart the movement of the gathering storm. So one day in the summer of 2017, I sped past Kershaw’s roadside grotesquerie and pushed on another twenty exits or so, waded through the city’s Downtown Loop traffic, and headed for the northwest corner of Fourth Avenue North and Church Street.

  Nashville, if you haven’t been there in a few years, might strike you as a city transformed. High-rise condos, neighborhoods with new names, people dressed in the hats and shirts of the local hockey team. I could tell you that Church intersects Fourth just up the hill from the honky-tonks on Broadway, but perhaps better to locate it as a ten-minute walk from the Bridgestone Arena. Though the corner here at Church and Fourth is now occupied by the twenty-story SunTrust building, it was—until a fire on Christmas Night, 1961—the location of the Maxwell House Hotel.

  The former hotel’s distinctive Corinthian columns have been replaced by the bank office’s polished marble pillars. I cased the perimeter of the building until I finally located the historic marker I was searching for. It’s laid into the last pillar on the Church Street end of the building. I had to stoop a little to read it. The marker informs that “After wartime use as barracks, hospital and prison, it was formally opened as a hotel in 1869.” Seven presidents stayed there, back when it was the city’s largest hotel. So, too, the sign notes, did “a host of celebrities from the world of business, politics, the arts and the military services.” The reason I’m here, though, goes unmentioned on the marker. Before the hotel formally opened to the public in 1869, it made certain wings of the hotel available to guests as they were completed. And it was in one of these rooms—Room Ten, to be exact—where the recently formed Ku Klux Klan held a swearing-in ceremony in the spring of 1867. John W. Morton, the Nashville Klan’s Grand Dragon (and, later, Tennessee’s Secretary of State), attended the ceremony in Room Ten and included an account of the meeting as an appendix to his Civil War memoir, published in 1909. The account is written by the author Thomas Dixon, Jr., who, Morton tells his readers, “has given a vivid picture of the admission of General Forrest to the order.”

  As Dixon tells it: “When the rumors of the Kuklux [sic] Klan first spread over Tennessee, General Forrest was quick to see its possibilities.” Forrest, back in Memphis after the war, had caught wind of the Klan and learned that Morton, his former chief of artillery, was already a member. So he headed for Nashville to seek him out. On finding Morton, “The general said: ‘John, I hear this Ku Klux Klan is organized in Nashville, and I know you are in it. I want to join.’” Morton apparently deflected at first, but invited Forrest to take a buggy ride with him and administered some preliminary rites. “ ‘That’s all I can give you now,’ Morton told Forrest. ‘Go to Room 10 at the Maxwell House to-night and you can get all you want. Now you know how to get in.’” So it was through the entrance on Church Street. with its Corinthian columns, under the chandeliers and past the gilded mirrors hanging in the lobby, and down
the corridor to Room Ten, where that night “The General was made a full-fledged clansman, and was soon elected Grand Wizard of the Invisible Empire.”

  It’s perhaps a bit too coincidental that Forrest just happened to arrive in Nashville on the very day of the Maxwell House Hotel meeting. Another story has it that an early Klan supporter travelled to Memphis to tell Forrest of the new group, to which Forrest reportedly responded, “That’s a good thing; that’s a damned good thing. We can use it to keep the n——s in their place,” before heading to Nashville to connect with John Morton. “The truth,” Forrest biographer Jack Hurst writes, “may lie in some combination of these accounts.”

  The early Klan was secretive, partial to costume, given to ceremony. Hence the hotel room. They had first formed a year earlier in Pulaski, Tennessee, seventy-five miles south of Nashville. It was, at first, only a local thing, a political stunt to buoy the spirits of the war-wrecked white citizens in a war-wrecked town. (All together now: Palliative!) Evenings after the war, six men—James Crowe, Frank O. McCord, Richard Reed, John C. Lester, Calvin Jones, and John Booker Kennedy—would gather at a downtown law office to complain, commiserate, and play music. There’s a photo of them taken September 3, 1866, skinny in their black suits, grinning from under cocked hats, fingers fretting their musical instruments. On the image’s back is the caption “Midnight Rangers.” They started as a minstrel troupe with the name of an informal militia.

  One night, one suggested they found an organization. The idea had legs. But what to call it? “Kukloi,” one suggested, from kuklos, Greek for “circle,” popular then as a collegiate fraternity name. Another added “Klan” to alliterate and to reference their shared Celtic heritage. Ku Klux Klan, then. This new group gave the men a sense of purpose. And they embraced it. The uniform white-sheet-and-tall-hat combo came later. It started with more color, more provocation, more like a fever dream. “Like moon men,” historian Elaine Frantz Parsons calls them in Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction. They wore masks with horns of stuffed fabric, bonnets repurposed as masks with drawn-on thin lips and eye slits, robes and hoods of calico, ecru, and cotton, or robes of brown linen with diamond-patterned white trim. H. A. Eastman, the Freedmen’s Bureau officer in nearby Columbia, Tennessee, had them on his radar. He described their purpose as being “to annoy and intimidate the colored people.” They described themselves, in the pages of the Pulaski Citizen, like this: “the hideous fiends of night are holding high carnival over a world that is all their own.”