He was one of the authors of the "A Call for Unity" letter published during Martin Luther King Jr.'s incarceration in a Birmingham, Alabama jail, asking him and his “outsider” followers to refrain from demonstrating in the streets of Birmingham.
At a special chapel service at the University of the South to celebrate Jefferson Davis' birthday, the university's Ceremonial Mace, containing the Confederate flag, was consecrated to the memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, by Bishop Carpenter.
[4] Carpenter was one of eight white Alabama clergy who publicly opposed the 1963 Birmingham campaign for integration and wrote the "A Call for Unity" letter on April 12, 1963, to which the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. responded with his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" on April 16, 1963.
Actions such as this put him on the hit list of the White Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan.