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William Hodding Carter II (February 3, 1907 – April 4, 1972) was an American progressive journalist and author. Among other distinctions in his career, Carter was a Nieman Fellow and Pulitzer Prize winner. He died in Greenville, Mississippi, of a heart attack at the age of sixty-five. He is interred in the Greenville Cemetery.
He returned to Louisiana upon graduating. According to Ann Waldron, the young Carter was an outspoken white supremacy, yet he began to alter his thinking when he returned to the South to live. Waldron, Ann. Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist, Algonquin Books, 1993.
With his wife, Betty Werlein of New Orleans, Carter founded the Hammond Daily Courier, in 1932. The paper was known for its opposition to popular Louisiana governor Huey Long, but its support for the national Democratic Party.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 1946 for his editorials on intolerance, as exemplified by "", lambasting the ill treatment of Japanese American ( Nisei) soldiers returning from World War II. He was a professor for a single semester at Tulane.
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. Roberts, Eugene L. American Society of Newspaper Editors, July 31, 2004. Last accessed: 1/13/07.
Carter was strongly opposed to the Munich Conference, which ceded Sudetenland 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. Women's Crisis Support web site. Last accessed: 1/13/07.
He had dinner with Bobby Kennedy and his family the night before Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. Carter had also been 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.Lyndon Baines Johnson Oral History, interview, ibid.
In Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist, author Ann Waldron makes the case that although Carter crusaded for racial equality, he hedged on condemning segregation, and that after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, he attacked the intransigent White Citizens' Council, but only supported gradual integration.Waldron, ibid.
In defense of Carter, Claude Sitton, writing about Waldron's book in The New York Times says, "Readers 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 social 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."Sitton, Claude. The New York Times, Book Review.
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