Asa Earl Carter (September 4, 1925 – June 7, 1979) was a 1950s segregationist political activist, Ku Klux Klan organizer, and later Western novelist.
Years 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 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.
Prior to his literary career as "Forrest", Carter was politically active for years in Alabama as an opponent of the civil rights movement.
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.
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.
He refused to reduce his antisemitic rhetoric, and the Citizens' Council preferred to focus on preserving racial segregation against African Americans.
Carter was quoted by United Press International as saying that the NAACP had "infiltrated" Southern white teenagers with "immoral" rock and roll records.
[5] Carter made the national news again on September 1[6] and 2[7] of the same year, after he gave an inflammatory anti-integration speech in Clinton, Tennessee.
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.
[6][7] Later that year, Carter ran for a position on the Birmingham City Commission as the Commissioner For Public Safety against former office holder Eugene "Bull" Connor, who won that election in 1957.
[3]: 116 Carter siphoned away some of the "white lower-status vote" from Connor, but finished a distant last in the primary,[8] an indication that his style was becoming unacceptable to Alabama's "'respectable' segregationists.
[10] Also during the mid-1950s, Carter founded a paramilitary KKK splinter group, called the "Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy".
[11] Carter started a monthly publication entitled The Southerner, devoted to purportedly scientific theories of white racial superiority, as well as to anti-communist rhetoric.
[3]: 115 In April 1956, members of Carter's new KKK group attacked singer Nat King Cole on stage at a Birmingham concert.
[3]: 115 In September 1957, six members of Carter's Klan group abducted and attacked a black handyman named Judge Edward Aaron.
[11]When Wallace decided to enter national politics with a 1968 presidential run, he did not invite Carter on board for the campaign, as he sought to tone down his reputation as a segregationist firebrand.
[11] Carter's best-known fictional works are The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (1972, republished in 1975 as Gone to Texas) and The Education of Little Tree (1976), the latter book originally published as a memoir.
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".
agreed with this assessment, adding that Carter's treatment of Native Americans repeated the romanticized notion of the "Noble Savage".
This article shed light on Asa Carter's dual identity, and The Times shifted the book onto its fiction list.
His widow India Carter refused most interview requests during these years,[19] but confirmed to Publishers Weekly in 1991 that Forrest and Asa were the same person.
[24] 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.
"[19] 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.