Asa Carter

Asa Earl Carter (born September 4, 1925 in Anniston; died June 7, 1979 in Abilene, Texas) was a radio host and aspiring politician in Birmingham, the founder of an independent Ku Klux Klan group and the North Alabama Citizens Council, and the founder and editor of The Southerner monthly magazine. He worked as a speechwriter for George Wallace, and, later became a best-selling author, under the assumed identity of Forrest Carter.

Carter was the eldest of Ralph and Hermione Carter's four children and was raised in Oxford, graduating from Calhoun County High School in 1943. He served in the Navy during World War II and afterward married his high school sweetheart, the former India Thelma Walker.

He moved to Boulder, Colorado to study journalism at the University, but returned to Birmingham, where he and India raised their four children. Using the name Ace Carter, he worked at several radio stations before landing a hosting job at WILD-AM in 1953. His show, sponsored by the American State's Rights Association, was syndicated to more than twenty other stations. His claim that the National Conference of Christians and Jews was a hotbed of communism provoked community outrage, led by NCCJ Alabama chapter president Paul Head, that got Carter fired. Afterward he supported himself by running a filling station.

Race and politics

Marginalized by the Alabama Citizens Council for his anti-semitism, Carter founded his own North Alabama Citizens Council, and became an increasingly-outspoken defender of racial segregation. He told the UPI that the NAACP had "infiltrated" Southern white teenagers with rock and roll music and called for jukebox owners to remove black records.

By the mid-1950s, Carter had founded the Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy, an independent Klan group with paramilitary inclinations. It was members of that group that beat singer Nat "King" Cole at Municipal Auditorium on April 10, 1956. He also published The Southerner, which promulgated white racial superiority and anti-communist rhetoric. Four members of that group were convicted of torturing and mutilating Edward "Judge" Aaron in 1957.

On September 1, 1956 Carter gave a speech in Clinton, Tennessee, lambasting the desegregation of Clinton HIgh School. In the aftermath, a mob of white men damaged cars driven by African Americans and were turned away from the mayor's house by Sheriff's deputies. Fellow speaker John Kasper was charged with sedition and inciting a riot.

Carter, who was not personally present for those crimes, challenged the previously-ousted Bull Connor for the office of Police Commissioner in the 1956 Birmingham municipal election, but lost. In 1957 Connor's police arrested him and his brother James for assaulting officers who were investigating a shooting connected with Carter's KKK group. Carter left the group in 1958, but only after shooting two members in a dispute over finances. He was charged with attempted murder, but not prosecuted. That year he campaigned for Lieutenant Governor, finishing fifth in the five-man race which was won by Albert Boutwell.

During the 1960s, Carter worked as an uncredited speech writer for Governor George Wallace and, later, for his wife Lurleen. He is believed to have contributed to Wallace's infamous 1963 inaugural address in which he promised to uphold "Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever." Wallace himself claimed not to know Carter, but former staffers say that he was paid by others on Wallace's behalf. When Wallace campaigned for President in 1968 and sought to tone down the fervor of his views, Carter was no longer involved with him.

Carter challenged Wallace for Governor in 1970 Democratic primary. Once again he finished last in a field of five, with Wallace winning narrowly over Albert Brewer. Carter his supporters picketed the inauguration, carrying signs reading "Wallace is a bigot" and "Free our white children."

Literary career

After his defeat, Carter moved to Sweetwater, Texas, and later to St George's Island, Florida, where he busied himself with writing, using the assumed name of Forrest Carter.

His first novel, The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, was published in 1975. It was adapted into a motion picture by Clint Eastwood, who also starred. When interviewed about the book by Barbara Walters for the "Today Show", he was recognized by many in Alabama as the same man who had just run unsuccessfully for governor a few years earlier. He denied being the same man in a follow-up interview for The New York Times.

He followed up with a sequel, as well as a purported memoir entitled The Education of Little Tree in 1976. While marketed as Forrest Carter's autobiography, the story involved a boy orphaned as a youth and raised in the Cherokee culture by his grandparents. The original Delacorte edition claimed that the author was a "Storyteller in Council" to the Cherokee tribe. Members of the Cherokee nation have disclaimed any connection with Carter and have found numerous inaccuracies regarding their culture and language as described in the book. Critics and historians have lodged similar complaints, finding his depiction of Native Americans to be drawn from "noble savage" mythology rather than from reality.

In 1978 Carter completed a fictionalized biography of Geronimo, entitled Watch for Me on the Mountain. Having separated from his wife, Carter moved to Abilene, Texas where he was working on a follow-up to The Education of Little Tree. He died from heart failure in June 1979 and his body was returned to Anniston for burial.

The Education of Little Tree was re-released in a paperback edition by the University of New Mexico Press in 1985. With the controversy over its authorship forgotten, the book sold more than 600,000 copies. It was named "Book of the Year" by the American Booksellers and was ranked atop The New York Times non-fiction best-seller list for several weeks. When historian and distant relative of Carter's, Dan T. Carter, published an article about Asa Carter's double life in the Times in 1991, the newspaper moved the book to its fiction list and the UNM Press reworked the cover, removing the claim that it was a true story. Oprah Winfrey, who had endorsed the book in 1994, removed it from her list of recommendations in 2007.

The book was adapted into a feature length film by Richard Friedenberg in 1997, stoking renewed controversy about Carter. The original Delacorte editor, Eleanor Friede, characterized the connection as "nasty gossip".

Publications

• Carter, Forrest (1973) The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales. Whippoorwill Publishers. (Reprinted by Delacorte in 1975 as Gone to Texas; and by Dell in 1980 as The Outlaw Josey Wales)
• Carter, Forrest (1976) The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales. Delacorte Press
• Carter, Forrest (1976)The Education of Little Tree. Delacorte Press
• Carter, Forrest (1978) Watch for Me on the Mountain. Delacorte Press (Republished by Dell in 1980 as Cry Geronimo!)

References

• "Is Forrest Carter Really Asa Carter? Only Josey Wales May Know for Sure" (August 26, 1976) The New York Times
• Carter, Dan T. (October 4, 1991) "The Transformation of a Klansman." The New York Times
• Carter, Dan T. (1993) "Southern History, American Fiction: The Secret Life of Southwestern Novelist Forrest Carter." in Lothar Honnighausen and Valeria Gennaro Lerda, eds. Rewriting the South: History and Fiction. Tübingen, Germany: Francke. pp. 286-304
• Reid, Calvin (October 25, 1991) "Widow of 'Little Tree' Author Admits He Changed Identity". Publishers Weekly
• Gates, Henry Louis Jr. (November 24, 1991) "[www.macalester.edu/internationalstudies/Gates-Authenticity.pdf]." "'Authenticity', or the Lesson of Little Tree". The New York Times Book Review
• Rubin, Dana (February 1992) "The Real Education of Little Tree." Texas Monthly.

External links

• Asa Carter profile on PBS's People and Events