[1] A lifelong Democrat, Carter helped lead the Byrd Organization's policy of Massive Resistance to racial integration in Virginia's public schools.
Their family's cattle company (the 17th oldest business in the country)[2] was the largest ranching operation east of the Mississippi river for nearly a century.
The huge cattle and farming operations, the oldest in the country, employed thousands of local people in several southwest Virginia counties.
He lived in a mansion called Rosedale in Elk Garden, which his uncle Governor H. C. Stuart had built, but which burned down as a result of lightning strikes in a 2012 storm.
In 1940, voters of Buchanan, Russell and Tazewell Counties elected him to the Virginia State Senate, District 18, replacing Jack W. Witten.
That reacted against the United States Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education (and companion cases including one from Prince Edward County, Virginia) in 1954 and 1955.