Hodding Carter

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Hodding Carter bigraphy, stories - Journalists

Hodding Carter : biography

February 3, 1907 – April 4, 1972

William Hodding Carter, II (February 3, 1907 – April 4, 1972) was a prominent Southern U.S. progressive journalist and author. Carter was born in Hammond, the largest community in Tangipahoa Parish, in southeastern Louisiana, to William Hodding Carter, I (1881–1955), and the former Irma Dutartre. Among other distinctions in his career, Carter was a Nieman Fellow.

Carter died in Greenville of a heart attack at the age of sixty-five. He is interred in the Greenville Cemetery.

Research

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.

Carter’s books

  • The Winds of Fear (1945)
  • Southern Legacy (1950)
  • Gulf Coast Country (1951) (with Anthony Ragusin)
  • John Law Wasn’t So Wrong: The Story of Louisiana’s Horn of Plenty (Baton Rouge, La.: Esso Standard Oil Company, 1952).
  • Where Main Street Meets the River (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1953)
  • Robert E. Lee and the Road of Honor (1954)
  • So Great a Good (1955)
  • Marquis de Lafayette: Bright Sword for Freedom (1958)
  • The Angry Scar: The Story of Reconstruction (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1959)
  • First Person Rural (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963)
  • The Ballad of Catfoot Grimes and Other Verses (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964)
  • So the Heffners Left McComb (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965)
  • The Commandos of World War II (1966)
  • Their Words Were Bullets: The Southern Press in War, Reconstruction, and Peace Mercer University Memorial Lectures, No. 12 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1969)

Memorable quotes

  • "Television news is like a lightning flash. It makes a loud noise, lights up everything around it, leaves everything else in darkness and then is suddenly gone."
  • "There are two things we should give our children: one is roots and the other is wings." (Borrowed from the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher.)

Criticism

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." The Nation, "And the Beat Goes On", January 8, 2007. 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.Waldron, ibid.

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."Sitton, Claude. The New York Times, Book Review.

Biography

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, the young Carter was an outspoken white supremacist, like most Southerners of that time, yet he began to alter his thinking when he came back home to the South to live. Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist, Algonquin Books, 1993.