On Friday, Jeff Tischauser of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch released a story about Sean Kauffmann, the apparent leader of the attic Nazis out at the racist gas station in the Bells Bend area. It’s an interesting story, just to see everything all together in one place. But the important nugget is this quote from anti-fascist researcher Gwen Snyder:
“Kauffmann is escalatingly violent in his confrontation with political opposition and is currently emboldened by his new relationships with local MAGA GOP actors in Tennessee. Of all the far-right extremists I’ve tracked and identified, he worries me the most in terms of immediate potential for enacting a deadly terror event. The man is a ticking time bomb.”
Great. I have been thinking about why all these racist activists are moving to Tennessee, instead of, say, Alabama or Arkansas. Is it because our politicians will speak at their political rallies? Is it because our judges aren’t diligent about checking to make sure they aren’t supporting their causes? Is it because the Sons of Confederate Veterans have a museum down in Columbia?
From the KKK to FBI informants and the Council of Conservative Citizens, the roots of vile racist hate run deep in our city
A couple of weeks ago, a friend texted me and asked if Draughon Avenue down off Granny White Pike was named for the Draughon of Draughon’s Practical Business College from back in the day. (Long answer short: Yes, same dude.) I was all, “Let me look on the parcel viewer and see what the history of the property is.” That’s when I saw that subdivision was called The Oriental Golf Club.
"The Oriental Golf Club." I guess no one goes through our parcel information and makes sure there aren’t any slurs just hanging out on the map? And what even was The Oriental Golf Club? I started going through old newspapers and found a 2007 George Zepp column in The Tennessean with a quote that explains it: “'It began with the Jewish community’s Standard Club, but then the Shriners took it over and it became the Oriental Golf Club.'” And then, miraculously, my eyeballs shriveled up like raisins in my head and I didn’t read the rest of the sentence, and we all lived happily ever after. The end.
Merry Christmas, y’all, and I’ll see you next year. Oh, wait. I won’t, because my eyeballs turned to dust in their sockets.
Alas, no. I did read on: “... said Nashville lawyer Jack Kershaw, who lives in the sprawling clubhouse today. Kershaw, also an artist and Confederate Army history buff, is repairing the residence at what is now 3616 Doge Place.”
Jack Kershaw. Confederate Army history buff.
This is why Sean Kauffmann and friends are here. This is exactly why. We don’t remember shit. "Confederate Army history buff." Like Kauffmann is a World War II German history buff. Kershaw penned many letters to the editor that The Tennessean published. One gem from 1998 reads:
To the Editor:
Congratulations to Bud Adams for his selection of the name “Titans” for his pro football team.
Titans not only have a reputation for ferocity in Green mythology, but in a more recent tradition Titans were sub-offices of the group formed to prevent complete chaos after the War of Northern Aggression.
It is most appropriate for the team members to be Titans, while the coach would of course be the Grand Dragon and Bud Adams the Grand Wizard.
Jack Kershaw
3616 Doge Place 37204
The paper ran this four years after Kershaw helped found the League of the South. That was 20 years after he started representing MLK assassin James Earl Ray, which was 20 years after he was a high-up member of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government — which was a group of “respectable” racists who funneled money and legal help to the Ku Klux Klan when it was needed, much like the League of the South would funnel money and training to the racists at Charlottesville.
When Zepp wrote his column, the notoriously hideous Nathan Bedford Forrest statue that Kershaw had erected out along I-65 had been up for eight years. Meaning it had been eight years since Kershaw said, “Someone needs to say a good word for slavery.”
And George Zepp was The Tennessean’s history dude! (And a really good one, at that. His book is a lot of fun.)
Jack Kershaw spent his whole adult life being a huge supporter of racist terrorists and a huge racist himself. I’m not trying to make a dig against Zepp or do some kind of gotcha for something he wrote 16 years ago, but Zepp certainly had to know that Kershaw was more than just a Civil War history enthusiast. And if he didn’t, someone else at The Tennessean surely did.
A widely mocked Nashville statue of the early KKK leader was removed Tuesday morning
So why was this dangerous racist being passed off like some kind of mild eccentric? If I had to lay money on it, I’d bet that it just didn’t occur to Zepp. In other words, that he forgot. And to reiterate, this is no knock on Zepp. Back in the heady days of 2007, I’d think his editor and a copy editor read this. They didn’t notice anything amiss enough to question why they were platforming Kershaw.
This isn’t a one-off thing. This is something fundamental to how the city functions. We’ve already talked about how Brad Lewis has benefited from everyone in town somehow forgetting that he’s from a very powerful, prominent, politically involved family, and is just treating him like ... well, how we treated Jack Kershaw — as an alarming but ultimately harmless local kook.
So why wouldn’t Kauffman settle here? If he sticks around long enough, we’ll all just start treating him the same way. We won’t even require him to stop being evil.
I don’t know, y’all. I don’t have a good explanation for it, but how can we ever deal with anything, ever protect ourselves from it, ever move past it, if we so easily forget it?
