Update 11:45 a.m. (Aug. 23): Robert Echols has provided evidence backing up his claim that he gave money to the Heritage Covenant School, which was then given to the Mary Noel Kershaw Foundation. Echols showed the Scene six donation checks made out to the school, three of which — as the documents show — were endorsed over to the foundation. No checks were made to the Kershaw Foundation. It is unclear whether this is an error in disclosure to the IRS by the foundation or by the school. Echols maintains that he had no knowledge of the Kershaw Foundation and says that he and David Jones, who ran the school and has ties to the white-supremacist organization the League of the South, had never discussed politics or issues related to race at a bible study they attended.
Original Column: Nowadays, if Jack Kershaw is remembered for anything, he’s remembered as being a mild eccentric who loved the South and sculpted that ugly-ass statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest (though I think he had some skill as a painter). Which just goes to show, if you live long enough and are charming enough to the right people, you can outrun just about any bad thing you’ve ever done.
But ol' Jack, dead as he is, still haunts us as a city.
Mike Reicher has a story in The Tennessean about how retired federal judge Robert L. Echols, who practices with Bass, Berry and Sims, repeatedly gave money to the Mary Noel Kershaw Foundation, which Jack Kershaw set up to honor his wife and funnel money to the League of the South, which then used it to aid white supremacists, including the folks at Charlottesville, Va., this weekend:
[Echols] could not be reached for comment Wednesday. His assistant said he was on vacation and not reachable by cell phone. The law firm issued a statement, through a spokeswoman, condemning "views espoused by hate groups such as this one.""We expect everyone affiliated with our firm to conduct themselves according to our values, which are rooted in integrity, fairness, inclusion and respect," the statement said. "That is why, as soon as we learned about this news story, we launched our own internal investigation. We are taking all necessary steps to address this issue."
Public tax filings for the Kershaw Foundation list Echols donating $1,600 and $1,350 between October 2014 and September 2016. The nonprofit forms list his law office's address.
OK, listen, I’m about to launch into a history of how wealthy racist Nashvillians have funneled money and aid to violent racists, but before I do, I have to say that if the people at Bass, Berry and Sims are trying to pretend like they didn’t know one of their lawyers might have a Confederate-sympathizing problem, then they never
joined him at the Belle Meade Country Club.
I mean, who ever could have guessed that a man willing to belong to a club that famously had no black or Jewish members for most of its history (federal judge Waverly Crenshaw is the only black member now), and had a huge portrait of Robert E. Lee inside, might be giving to racists? Lord, that’s hilarious. I’m dying to see what they say about that internal investigation.
It’s like that old They Might Be Giants song says: "Can’t shake the devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding."
Anyway, Jack Kershaw. So back in the day, literally, in the days when Vanderbilt University was expelling the Rev. James Lawson for his “racial” activities in Nashville, Donald Davidson, Fugitive poet and beloved Vanderbilt professor, was running a racist hate group full of other Vanderbilt affiliated people: the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government. As the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture notes, it was generally ineffective at stopping integration.
But it was damn effective at funneling money and legal aid to other, more violent white supremacists while at the same time claiming refined, proper gentlemen such as themselves thought violence was unfortunate. The legal aid they provided was often to Jack Kershaw.
What’s especially interesting about Davidson’s involvement is that it means we had two famous poets involved in trying to keep Tennessee segregated. John Kasper’s close friend and mentor was fascist traitor Ezra Pound. And one thing that’s perplexed historians about why, when the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government sent Kershaw over to Clinton, Tenn., to bail out all the white people who’d rioted against school desegregation in 1956, they pointedly left John Kasper sitting in jail.
I have a theory, but it’s a nerdy English major theory, that Davidson’s and Pound’s racist beliefs were incompatible. Davidson believed that the white race in the South had a mythical relationship to the South, to the actual land of the South, and that a poet’s role was to help cultivate this relationship to place. Pound, on the other hand, could be a racist in London, Paris, Italy or confined to a hospital here in the U.S. He felt no ties to any particular soil. So I imagine it galled Davidson to have Kasper flitting down here from New Jersey, as if a man could just remove himself from his homeland and still have any meaning.
Kershaw came to the aid of the suspects in the Hattie Cotton Elementary School bombing, and he was also James Earl Ray’s lawyer for a while. If you go through old newspaper clips, you get the impression his catchphrase was, “I think we can all agree this is the colored people’s fault,” because he never passed up an opportunity to unleash that sentiment.
If there’s a word for being negatively impressed with Jack Kershaw, that’s how I feel. Very few racists leave any kind of legacy. Mostly, they die and good riddance, they’re forgotten. But Kershaw spent his life advocating for and helping aid poorer racists achieve their racist goals. He died in 2010, and half a decade later, there’s Echols giving Kershaw’s foundation money so that it can continue his work, which they do to this very day. The Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government got its start in the mid-1950s, which means Jack Kershaw’s racist project has been ongoing for 60 years!
Sixty years!
And the thing is that Kershaw wasn’t shy about who he was. I mean, he sculpted that Nathan Bedford Forrest statue, defended Klan members and blamed black people for things all the time. As far as I can tell, Kershaw never mellowed or downplayed his beliefs.
We as a city don’t know about them because a bunch of people — A BUNCH OF PEOPLE — decided it was easier to go along to get along and downplay his racist life’s focus. No one turned Jack Kershaw into a harmless old-fashioned eccentric for his sake. They did that for their own sake, so they didn’t have to ask themselves why they were so comfortable with being friendly with a man actively and proudly working for white supremacist goals.
It’s thanks to Jack Kershaw’s life’s work that a woman was killed last weekend. But Kershaw was just the yolk in the great egg of racism. People like Echols are the whites (heh) that nourish what forms in the yolk. And all the white people who pretend they don’t know what’s going on or pretend like they don’t see it are the shell that holds it all together and keep it safe to grow.
By Thursday morning, Echols and, as it turns out, other members of his Bible study group who donated money to the Kershaw foundation, had an excuse. Phil Williams over at NewsChannel 5 reports that they all gave money to benefit Heritage Covenant School, which is run by David O. Jones, who also ran their weekly Bible study.
Echols told the The Tennessean that he has "a long history of supporting education, my community and my profession, and will continue to give to organizations that make the world a better place."
I bet he wishes he'd waited until after Williams' story to make his statement, because — the education that Echols was supporting with the money he gave to the Kershaw foundation? Well, Williams got Jones to admit that he teaches his students that slavery wasn't that bad and that he, himself, had been past state chair of the League of the South, was on the Kershaw foundation, and is chairman of the Southern National Congress, which is a secession organization.
From Williams' story:
NewsChannel 5 Investigates noted, 'The fact is, you are a secessionist.''Yeah,' he acknowledged with a smile.
But here's the thing, while two-thirds of me thinks Echols is full of shit, one-third of me kind of believes him. I think a rich white guy in Nashville could believe that "real racism" is just what poor, dumb trash like the Klan does, and that good people, who go to the right schools and belong to the most discerning clubs, aren't really racist racist. They're just eccentrics or old-fashioned. And since we're all friends here, the polite thing to do is to tolerate their old-fashioned eccentricities.
This is, at its core, what I mean about providing racists cover. Because so many people in town want to do the things racists do for racist reasons — belong to this club, support this school, hang out with these people, etc. — you can't immediately tell if someone is giving money to the Kershaw foundation because they're racist. So, when racists do it, it doesn't seem out of the ordinary. It doesn't raise any red flags.
Maybe Echols and his buddies didn't know, whether it was willful ignorance or not. But there's really not that much of a difference between knowingly providing comfort and support to racists and ignoring what's in front of you so that you can provide comfort and support to people you're refusing to see are racists.
