Education

Carter was valedictorian of the Hammond High School class of 1923. Carter attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, (1927) and the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University (1928). He returned to Louisiana upon graduating. According to Ann Waldron, Carter was an outspoken white supremacist, yet he began to alter his thinking when he came back home to the South to live.

Career background

After a year as a teaching fellow at Tulane University in New Orleans (1928—1929), Carter worked as reporter for the following: the New Orleans Item-Tribune (1929), United Press in New Orleans (1930), and the Associated Press in Jackson, Mississippi (1931—32).

With his wife, Betty nee Werlein (1910–2000) of New Orleans, Carter founded the Hammond Daily Courier, in 1932. The paper was noted for its opposition to popular Louisiana governor Huey Pierce Long, Jr., but its support for the national Democratic Party.

In 1939, Carter moved to Greenville, a Mississippi Delta city and the seat of Washington County, where he launched his successful Greenville Delta Democrat-Times, a newspaper later published, first, by his oldest son, William Hodding Carter, III, and, currently, by his second son, Philip Dutartre Carter (born 1939).

He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his editorials, in particular a series lambasting the ill-treatment of Japanese-American (Nisei) soldiers returning from World War II. He was a professor for a single semester at Tulane.

Fighting intolerance

He also wrote editorials in the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times regarding social and economic intolerance in the Deep South that won him widespread acclaim and the moniker "Spokesman of the New South."

Carter wrote a caustic article for Look magazine which detailed the menacing spread of a chapter of the White Citizens' Council. The article was attacked on the floor of the Mississippi House of Representatives as a, "Willful lie by a nigger-loving editor." Carter responded in a front-page editorial:

By vote of 89 to 19, the Mississippi House of Representatives has resolved the editor of this newspaper into a liar because of an article I wrote. If this charge were true, it would make me well qualified to serve in that body. It is not true. So to even things up, I hereby resolve by a vote of one to nothing that there are eighty-nine liars in the state legislature.

Personal background

The Carters married on October 14, 1931. In addition to Hodding and Philip, they had a younger son, Thomas Hennen Carter (1945–1964). Thomas killed himself playing a game of Russian roulette.

Carter was strongly opposed to the Munich Conference which ceded Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler. Carter rushed into World War II service. While stationed at Camp Blanding in Florida, he lost the sight in his right eye during a training exercise. He thereafter served in the Intelligence Division and continued his journalistic activities by editing the Middle East division of Yank and Stars and Stripes in Cairo, Egypt, and writing three books.

Late in life, Carter attended the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in 1965.

Politics and the Kennedys

Carter was an unabashed supporter of the Kennedys and their quest for the American presidency. He had dinner with Bobby Kennedy and his family the night before RFK was assassinated. He was also working for him "campaigning, making talks, and writing ghost speeches."

On a flight home, Carter learned of Kennedy's death and was devastated. A passenger on the plane said, "Well, we got that son-of-a-bitch, didn't we?" Carter responded, "Who are you talking about?" The passenger said, "You know damn well who I'm talking about", to which Carter responded by saying "You're just a son-of-a-bitch", and then punching the passenger in the mouth.

Columnist Eric Alterman, in a book review of The Race Beat (2006) for The Nation discusses how Carter and other Southern journalists were "moderate defenders", of the South. That is, they were apologists for the South during the pre-civil rights era. Alterman says, "'Enlightened'" Southern editors, especially. . . Mississippi's Hodding Carter, Jr., sold [Northerners] a Chalabi-like dream of steady, nonviolent progress that belied the violent savagery that lay in wait for those who stepped out of line." One of the reasons segregation had been a success, Alterman explains, is "...the way newspapers had neglected it."

Ann Waldron, in her book Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist makes the case that Carter crusaded for racial equality, but hedged on condemning segregation and after the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, he attacked intransigent White Citizens' Council, but supported only gradual integration.

In defense of Carter, Claude Sitton, in a review of Waldron's book in the New York Times says, "[R]eaders of today will ask how an editor who opposed enactment of a federal antilynching law as unnecessary and public school desegregation in Mississippi as unwise can be called a champion of racial justice. The answer, which she gives in the book's introduction, lies in the context of the times. . . . Absent his efforts and those of other Southern editors of courage and like mind, change would have come far more slowly and at far greater cost."

For additional materials by and about Hodding Carter, Jr., the researcher is referred to Mitchell Library at Mississippi State University in Starkville, where Carter's personal papers are housed.