Asa Earl Carter

Asa Earl Carter (September 4, 1925 – June 7, 1979) was an American segregationist and Ku Klux Klan organizer who was prominent in the 1950s for his activism and later as a Western fiction novelist, known as a co-writer of George Wallace's well-known pro-segregation line of 1963, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." He ran in the Democratic primary for governor of Alabama as a white supremacist. Later, under the pseudonym of supposedly Cherokee writer Forrest Carter, he wrote The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (1972), a Western novel that was adapted into a 1976 film featuring Clint Eastwood that was added to the National Film Registry, and The Education of Little Tree (1976), a best-selling, award-winning book which was marketed as a memoir but which turned out to be fiction.

In 1976, following the success of The Rebel Outlaw and its film adaptation, The New York Times revealed Forrest Carter was actually Asa Carter. His background became national news again in 1991 after his purported memoir, The Education of Little Tree (1976), was re-issued in paperback, topping the Times paperback best-seller lists (both non-fiction and fiction) and winning the American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) award.

Prior to his literary career as "Forrest", Carter was politically active for years in Alabama as an opponent of the civil rights movement. In the mid-1950s, he had a syndicated segregationist radio show, and worked as a speech writer for segregationist Governor George Wallace of Alabama. He also founded the North Alabama Citizens Council (NACC), an independent offshoot of the White Citizens' Council movement formed by Carter when the White Citizens' Council tried to moderate Carter's antisemitism. He also formed the militant and violent Ku Klux Klan group known as the Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy, and started a monthly publication titled The Southerner which spread white supremacist and anti-communist rhetoric.

Early life

Asa Carter was born in Anniston, Alabama in 1925, the second eldest of four children. Despite later claims (as author "Forrest" Carter) that he was orphaned, he was raised by his parents Hermione and Ralph Carter in nearby Oxford, Alabama. Both parents lived into Carter's adulthood.

Carter served in the United States Navy during World War II and for a year studied journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder on the G.I. Bill. After the war, he married India Thelma Walker.

Career

Carter worked for several area radio stations before ending up at station WILD in Birmingham, where he worked from 1953 to 1955. Carter's broadcasts from WILD, sponsored by the American States Rights Association, were syndicated to more than 20 radio stations before the show was cancelled. Carter was fired following community outrage over his attacks on National Brotherhood Week, which promoted friendship with the Jewish community, and a boycott of WILD.

Carter made the national news again on September 1 and 2 of the same year, after he gave an inflammatory anti-integration speech in Clinton, Tennessee. He addressed Clinton's high school enrollment of 12 black students, and after his speech, an aroused mob of 200 white men stopped black drivers passing through, "ripping out hood ornaments and smashing windows". They were heading for the house of the mayor before being turned back by the local sheriff. Carter appeared in Clinton alongside segregationist John Kasper, who was charged later that same month with sedition and inciting a riot for his activities that day. an indication that his style was becoming unacceptable to Alabama's "'respectable' segregationists." The two men were both later found guilty of disorderly conduct and interfering with an officer and each fined $25. Also during the mid-1950s, Carter founded a paramilitary KKK splinter group, called the "Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy". Carter started a monthly publication entitled The Southerner, devoted to purportedly scientific theories of white racial superiority, as well as to anti-communist rhetoric. Wallace never acknowledged the role Carter played in his political career:

<blockquote>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. where he started over. He began work on his first novel, spending days researching in a public library in Sweetwater, Texas. He distanced himself from his past, began to call his sons "nephews" and renamed himself Forrest Carter, after Nathan Bedford Forrest, a general of the Confederate army who fought in the Civil War,

Carter moved to St. George's Island, Florida in the 1970s The author's Watch for Me on the Mountain (1978) is 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 reported to have been heart failure. However, the ambulance driver told one of Carter's friends that he had a drunken fight with his son, fell, and choked on his own vomit. Carter's body was returned to Alabama for burial near Anniston, Alabama.

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 New York Times article that he, Forrest, was not Asa Carter. 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 who speculated that, based on their shared heritage, he may be a distant cousin of Asa Carter (the supposition has since been stated elsewhere as fact), published the article "The Transformation of a Klansman" in The New York Times. This article shed light on Asa Carter's dual identity, and The Times shifted the book onto its fiction list.

A film adaptation of Little Tree (1997), revived publicity about Asa Carter. His widow India Carter refused most interview requests during these years, Eleanor Friede, Little Trees 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."

Works by Forrest Carter

Books

The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (1972; (Whippoorwill Pub., 1973; reprinted by Delacorte in 1975 as Gone to Texas; and by Dell in 1980 as The Outlaw Josey Wales)
The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales (1976, Delacorte Press)
The Education of Little Tree (1976, Delacorte Press)
Watch for Me on the Mountain (1978, Delacorte Press; 1980, republished by Dell as Cry Geronimo!)
The Wanderings of Little Tree (Unfinished)

Film adaptations

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
The Return of Josey Wales (1986)
The Education of Little Tree (1997)

Media about Carter

Books about Carter faking his ethnicity

Films about Carter

The documentary The Reconstruction of Asa Carter (2011) examines Carter's past as a KKK leader and the person who wrote George Wallace's "Segregation Now! Segregation Forever!" speech, and his reinvention as a best-selling "Native American" author.

Radio programs about Carter

Carter was the subject of a 2014 episode of the NPR program This American Life, titled "180 Degrees".