Asa Carter

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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. He served in the Navy during World War II and studied journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He married the former India Thelma Walker and settled with her in Birmingham, raising four children..

Carter 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.

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.

On September 1, 1956 he 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.

By the mid-1950s, Carter had founded the Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy, an independent Klan group with paramilitary inclinations. He also published The Southerner, which promulgated white racial superiority and anti-communist rhetoric. Carter challenged previously-ousted Police Commissioner Bull Connor for the office in the 1956 Birmingham municipal election, but lost to the better-known hothead. 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.

Members of Carter's new KKK group attacked singer Nat King Cole at an April 1956 Birmingham concert. After a more violent event, four members of Carter's Klan group were convicted of a September 1957 abduction and attack on a black handyman named Edward Aaron. They castrated Aaron, poured turpentine on his wounds, and left him abandoned in the trunk of a car near Springdale, Alabama. Police found Aaron, near death from blood loss. (Carter was not with the men who carried out this attack).

In 1958, Carter quit the Klan group he had founded after shooting two members in a dispute over finances. Birmingham police filed attempted murder charges against Carter, but the charges were subsequently dropped. Carter also ran a campaign for Lieutenant Governor the same year that saw him finish fifth in a field of five. In 1963, a parole board, appointed by Carter's then-employer Alabama governor George Wallace, commuted the sentences of the four men convicted of attacking Aaron.

During the 1960s, Carter was a speechwriter for Wallace. He was one of two men credited with Wallace's famous slogan, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever", part of his 1963 inaugural speech. Carter continued to work for Wallace. After his wife Lurleen was elected Governor of Alabama in 1966, Carter worked for her. Wallace never acknowledged the role Carter played in his political career, however:

"Till the day he died, George Wallace denied that he ever knew Asa Carter. He may have been telling the truth. 'Ace', as he was called by the staff, was paid off indirectly by Wallace cronies, and the only record that he ever wrote for Wallace was the word of former Wallace campaign officials such as finance manager Seymore Trammell."

When Wallace decided to enter national politics with a 1968 presidential run, he did not invite Carter on board for the campaign. He sought to tone down his reputation as a segregationist firebrand. During the late 1960s, Carter grew disillusioned by what he saw as Wallace's liberal turn on race.

Carter ran against Wallace for governor of Alabama in 1970 on a white supremacist platform. He finished last in a field of five candidates, winning only 1.51% of the vote in an election narrowly won by Wallace over the more moderate Governor Albert Brewer. At Wallace's 1971 inauguration, Carter and some of his supporters demonstrated against him, carrying signs reading "Wallace is a bigot" and "Free our white children". The demonstration was the last notable public appearance by "Asa Carter".

Literary career and death

After losing the election, Carter relocated to Sweetwater, Texas, where he started over. He began work on his first novel, spending days researching in Sweetwater's public library. He distanced himself from his past, began to call his sons "nephews", and renamed himself Forrest Carter, in honor of Confederate Civil War general Nathan Bedford Forrest.<ref name="tshaonline.org" />

He and his wife later moved to St. George's Island, Florida. There Carter completed a sequel to his first novel, as well as two books on Native American themes.<ref name="tshaonline.org" /> Carter separated from his wife, who remained in Florida. In the late 1970s, he relocated to Abilene, Texas.<ref name="little_fraud" />

Carter's best-known fictional works are The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (republished in 1975 under the title Gone to Texas) and The Education of Little Tree (1976), originally published as a memoir. The latter sold modestly during Carter's life. It became a sleeper hit in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s.

Clint Eastwood directed and starred in a 1976 film adaptation of Josey Wales, retitled The Outlaw Josey Wales. In 1997, after the success of the paperback edition of The Education of Little Tree, a film adaptation was produced. Originally intended as a made-for-TV movie, it was given a theatrical release.

In 1978, Carter published Watch for Me on the Mountain, a fictionalized biography of Geronimo. (It was reprinted in 1980 in an edition titled, Cry Geronimo!)

Carter was working on The Wanderings of Little Tree, a sequel to The Education of Little Tree, as well as a screenplay version of the book, when he died in Abilene on June 7, 1979. The cause of death was heart failure. Carter's body was returned to Alabama for burial near Anniston. No family members attended his funeral.

Controversy and criticism

Carter spent the last part of his life trying to conceal his background as a Klansman and segregationist, claiming categorically in a 1976 The New York Times article that he, Forrest, was not Asa Carter.<ref>Greenhaw, Wayne. "Is Forrest Carter Really Asa Carter? Only Josey Wales May Know for Sure", The New York Times, August 26, 1976.</ref> The article describes him as Forrest Carter being interviewed by Barbara Walters on the Today show in 1974. He was promoting The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, which had begun to attract readers beyond the confines of the Western genre. Carter, who had run for governor of Alabama (as Asa Carter) just four years earlier, was identified by several Alabama politicians, reporters and law enforcement officials from this Today show appearance. The Times also reported that the address Carter used in the copyright application for The Rebel Outlaw was identical to the one that he used in 1970 while running for governor. "Beyond denying that he is Asa Carter", the Times noted, "the author has declined to be interviewed on the subject."

Carter claimed that he was Little Tree and the events of the book were autobiographical. In 1985 the book was purchased for a paperback edition and marketed by the University of New Mexico Press as a memoir. It was subtitled "A True Story by Forrest Carter". The story described the relationship between the boy and his Scottish-Cherokee grandfather, a man named Wales (an overlap with Carter's other fiction). Written from the perspective of a boy orphaned at age five, the book described how he had become accustomed to life in a remote mountain hollow with his "Indian thinking" 'Granpa' and Cherokee 'Granma', who called him 'Little Tree'.

Granpa runs a small whiskey operation during Prohibition and the later years of the Great Depression. The grandparents and visitors to the hollow expose Little Tree to (supposed) Cherokee ways and "mountain people" values. The state removes him to an orphanage, where he stays for a few months until an old Indian friend intimidates the director into allowing Little Tree's release. (In life, Carter was neither orphaned, nor raised by Cherokee grandparents.)

Before taking a new name and identity, Carter had claimed to have distant maternal Cherokee ancestry, a claim corroborated by some of his family members. Delacorte Press's original author biography referred to Carter as the Cherokee "Storyteller in Council." Members of the Cherokee nation have disputed his claim. They said so-called "Cherokee" words and customs in "The Education of Little Tree" are inaccurate, and the novel's characters are stereotyped. Several scholars and critics agreed with this assessment, adding that Carter's treatment of Native Americans repeated the romantic but racist concept of the "Noble Savage".

In 1985, the University of New Mexico Press bought rights to The Education of Little Tree from original publisher Delacorte Press and published it in paperback. By its second year, the new paperback edition began to sell briskly through word-of-mouth publicity. Sales eventually surpassing 600,000. Though Carter's background as Asa Carter was discussed in academic circles, it was not widely known by the book-buying public nearly ten years after the 1976 New York Times article about him. In 1991, after the book won the American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) award, it ranked number one on The New York Times non-fiction paperback best-seller list for several weeks.

On October 4, 1991, Dan T. Carter (a history professor and distant cousin of Asa Carter) published the article "The Transformation of a Klansman" in the New York Times. This article shed light on Asa Carter's dual identity. The Times shifted the book onto its fiction list.

In 1997, a film adaptation of Little Tree was released, which revived publicity about Asa Carter. Carter's widow, India Carter, refused most interview requests during these years. Eleanor Friede, Little Tree's original editor, defended Carter's background in 1997, telling the Times, "[H]e was not a member of the Ku Klux Klan. I honestly don't see the point of all this nasty gossip dragged out years ago."

Following the 1991 publicity, the University of New Mexico Press changed the cover of Little Tree, removing the "True Story" subtitle and adding a fiction classification label. The biographical material in the introduction has never been changed to include details of Carter's involvement with segregationist politics and the KKK. Little Tree has continued to find readers and a place on reading lists for young adults since 1991. For fans who know of the controversy, many take the position of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who argued that Little Tree can be appreciated for its message of tolerance and its other qualities, despite the biography of its creator.

Richard Friedenberg wrote and directed the 1997 film adaptation. He also has defended the book, but not the author:

Mr. Friedenberg said what appealed to him about the book was that "the characters and milieu they were in represented everything that was good about America and everything that was bad." On the one hand, he said, the book dealt with the strength of the family and not necessarily with traditional families. On the other hand, he said, it dealt with ignorance and prejudice. Mr. Friedenberg said he found it perplexing and almost impossible to understand Mr. Carter's motives and literary ambitions. Although Mr. Carter, who wrote four books, failed to address the issue of his bigotry publicly, Mr. Friedenberg said he believed that "his apology was in his literature." For example, he said, the handful of blacks and Jews in his books are depicted sympathetically. "The bad guys are almost, without fail, rich whites, politicians and phony preachers," Mr. Friedenberg said.

Oprah Winfrey, who in 1994 endorsed Little Tree, subsequently removed it from her list of recommended book titles:

"I no longer—even though I had been moved by the story—felt the same about this book," Winfrey said in 1994. "There's a part of me that said, 'Well, OK, if a person has two sides of them and can write this wonderful story and also write the segregation forever speech, maybe that's OK.' But I couldn't—I couldn't live with that."

The book has also been criticized on literary grounds: "I am surprised, of course, that Winfrey would recommend it," says Lorene Roy, president of the American Library Association. "Besides the questions about the author's identity, the book is known for a simplistic plot that used a lot of stereotypical imagery."

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

Books about Carter's faking of ethnicity

  • Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (Laura Browder, 2003)
  • Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Shari M. Huhndorf, 2004)
  • Native American Fiction: A User's Guide (David Treuer, 2006)

Articles about Carter's faking of ethnicity

External links

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