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Asa Earl Carter

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Asa Earl Carter (September 4, 1925–June 7, 1979) was an American speechwriter and author. He worked as a speechwriter for segregationist Governor George Wallace of Alabama, and was founder of the North Alabama Citizens Council (NACC) and a pro-segregation monthly titled The Southerner. Under an assumed identity as 'Forrest Carter,' he published two Westerns and a purported memoir, The Education of Little Tree, in which he portrays himself as having been orphaned into the care of Cherokee grandparents. In 1976, following the success of his western The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales Forrest Carter was revealed to be segregationist Asa Earl Carter by the New York Times. His background once again became national news in 1991 after Little Tree topped the Times paperback best-seller lists (both non-fiction, and later, fiction) and won the American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) award. (photo [1])

Early life and political career

Asa Carter was born in Anniston, Alabama in 1925, the eldest of four children. Despite his claims (as author "Forrest" Carter) that he was orphaned, he was in fact raised by his parents, Ralph and Hermione Carter--both of whom lived into Carter's adulthood--in nearby Oxford, Alabama.

Carter served in the United States Navy during World War II and studied journalism at the University of Colorado.[1] After the war, he married India Thelma Walker. The couple had four children and settled in Birmingham, Alabama. Carter worked for several area radio stations before ending up at station WILD in Birmingham, where he worked from 1953 to 1955. Carter's broadcasts from WILD, sponsored by the American State's Rights Association, were eventually syndicated to more than twenty radio stations before the show was cancelled and Carter fired following community outrage and a boycott of WILD.[2] Carter broke with the leadership of the Alabama Citizen's Council movement over the incident; Carter refused to tone down his anti-Semitic rhetoric while the Citizen's Councils preferred to focus more narrowly on the segregation of Blacks. Carter started a renegade group called the North Alabama Citizen's Council at this time. In additional to his careers in broadcasting and politics, Carter during these years ran a filling station business.[3]

By March 1956, Carter was making national news as a spokesman for segregation. Carter was quoted in a UP wire news story as saying that the NAACP had "infiltrated" Southern white teenagers with "immoral" rock and roll records. Carter called for jukebox owners to purge all records by Negro performers from jukeboxes.[4]

Carter made the national news again on September 1[5] and 2[6] of the same year, after he gave an inflammatory anti-integration speech in Clinton, Tennessee. The speech was in reaction to Clinton's high school enrolling twelve Black students. The two news stories describe the speech and a resulting mob of 200 men stopping Black drivers passing through, "ripping out hood ornaments and smashing windows" and heading for the house of the mayor before being turned back by the local Sheriff. Carter was in Clinton alongside segregationist John Kaspar, who was charged later that same month with sedition and inciting a riot for his activities in Clinton.

In 1957, Carter was jailed for fighting against Birmingham police officers alongside four companions, one being his brother James. The police were attempting to apprehend one of the men, who was wanted for a Ku Klux Klan shooting.[7] Ironically, that previous year Carter had run for Police Commissioner against former office holder Bull Connor (who became nationally famous for his heavy-handed approach to law enforcement during the civil rights struggles in Birmingham) in an election that saw Connor win back his old office.[8]

Also during the mid-1950s, Carter founded a paramilitary KKK splinter group called the Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy (the group members dressed in gray to distinguish themselves from other Klan groups),[9] and he started a monthly publication entitled The Southerner that was devoted to purportedly-scientific theories of white racial superiority as well as to anti-communist rhetoric.[10] Members of Carter's new Klan group were responsible for attacking singer Nat "King" Cole at an April, 1956 Birmingham concert.[11] In a more gruesome attack, four members of Carter's Klan group were convicted of a September, 1957 abduction and attack on a black handyman named Edward Aaron. Aaron was castrated, had turpentine poured on his wounds, and was then put in the trunk of a car and abandoned near Springdale, Alabama where he was found by police near death from blood loss (Carter was not with the men who carried out this attack).[12] In 1958, Carter himself quit the Klan group he had founded after shooting two members in a dispute over finances. Birmingham Police filed attempted murder charges against Carter over the incident, but the charges were subsequently dropped.[13] Carter also ran a campaign for Lieutenant Governor the same year that saw him finish fifth in a field of five.[14] In 1963, a parole board appointed by Carter's then-employer Alabama governor George Wallace commuted the sentences of the four men convicted of attacking Aaron.[15]

During the 1960s, Carter was a speechwriter for Wallace, and is one of two men credited with what many say is Wallace's most famous slogan, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" (included in Wallace's 1963 inaugural speech). Carter continued to work for Wallace and for Wallace's wife Lurleen,[16] who was elected Governor of Alabama in 1966. Wallace never acknowledged the role Carter played in his political career, however:

Till the day he died, George Wallace denied that he ever knew Asa Carter. He may have been telling the truth. 'Ace,' as he was called by the staff, was paid off indirectly by Wallace cronies, and the only record that he ever wrote for Wallace was the word of former Wallace campaign officials such as finance manager Seymore Trammell.[17]

When Wallace decided to enter national politics with his 1968 presidential run, he pointedly did not invite Carter on board for the campaign, which sought to tone down Wallace's reputation as a segregationist firebrand. During the late 1960s, Carter grew disillusioned by what he saw as Wallace's liberal turn on race. Carter ran against Wallace for governor of Alabama in 1970 on a white supremacist platform, yet another irony in light of his later emphasis (as novelist "Forrest" Carter) on what he claimed was his Cherokee heritage. He once again finished last in a field of five candidates, winning only 1.51% of the vote in an election comfortably won by Wallace. At Wallace's 1971 inauguration, Carter and some of his supporters demonstrated by carrying signs reading "Wallace is a bigot" and "Free our white children". The demonstration was to be the last notable public appearance for "Asa Carter".[18]

Literary career and death

After losing the election, Carter relocated to Sweetwater, Texas,[19] where he reinvented himself and began his work on his first novel, spending his days researching in Sweetwater's public library. He distanced himself from his past, began to call his sons "nephews" and renamed himself Forrest Carter, in honor of Confederate Civil War general Nathan Bedford Forrest. He and his wife later moved to St. George's Island, Florida, where he completed a sequel to his first novel, and his two Native-American themed books.[20] Carter separated from his wife, who remained in Florida, and relocated to Abilene, Texas in the late-1970s.[21]

Carter's best-known fictional works are The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (republished in 1975 under the title Gone to Texas) and The Education of Little Tree (1976), which sold modestly during Carter's life, but became a sleeper hit in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. Clint Eastwood directed and starred in a 1976 film adaptation of the former, retitled The Outlaw Josey Wales. In 1997, a film version of The Education of Little Tree, originally intended to be a made-for-TV movie, was given a theatrical release.

In 1978, Carter published Watch for Me on the Mountain, a fictionalized biography of Geronimo (it was republished in 1980 as Cry Geronimo!). Carter was working on The Wanderings of Little Tree, a sequel to The Education of Little Tree and a screenplay version of the book when he died in Abilene on June 7, 1979 by choking on food and clotted blood after a fistfight, allegedly with his son. Carter's body was returned to Alabama for burial, near Anniston. No family members attended his funeral.[22]

Controversy and criticism

Carter spent the last part of his life trying to conceal his background as a Klansman and segregationist, claiming categorically in a 1976 New York Times article that he, Forrest, was not Asa Carter.[23] The article details how as Forrest, Carter was interviewed by Barbara Walters on the Today show in 1974. He was promoting The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, which had begun to attract readers beyond the confines of the Western genre. Carter, who had run for a campaign for governor of Alabama (as Asa Carter) just four years earlier which included television advertising, was identified from this Today show appearance by several Alabama politicians, reporters and law enforcement officials. The Times also reported that the address Carter used in the copyright application for The Rebel Outlaw was identical to the one that he used in 1970 while running for governor. "Beyond denying that he is Asa Carter", the Times noted, "the author has declined to be interviewed on the subject."

Carter had claimed that he was Little Tree and the events of the book were autobiographical. The book was marketed by the University of New Mexico Press as a memoir, subtitled "A True Story by Forrest Carter". The story (originally to be called "Me and Grandpa", according to the book's introduction) centers on the relationship between the boy and his Scottish-Cherokee grandfather, a man named Wales (an overlap with Carter's other fiction). The book is written from the perspective of a boy orphaned at age five, who tells how he became accustomed to his new home in a remote mountain hollow with his "Indian thinking" 'Granpa' and Cherokee 'Granma', who call him 'Little Tree.' Granpa runs a small whiskey operation during Prohibition and the later years of the Great Depression. The grandparents and visitors to the hollow expose Little Tree to (supposed) Cherokee ways and "mountain people" values. The state eventually removes him to an orphanage, where he stays for a few months until an old Indian friend intimidates the Reverend in charge into allowing Little Tree's release. In reality, Carter was not orphaned, nor was he raised by Cherokee grandparents.

Even before his name and identity change, however, Carter often claimed that he had distant maternal Cherokee ancestry, a claim corroborated by some of his family members.[24] Delacorte Press's original author biography referred to Carter as a Cherokee "Storyteller in Council." However, members of the Cherokee nation have disputed this claim, saying also that so-called "Cherokee" words and customs in "The Education of Little Tree" are inaccurate, and that the novel's characters are stereotyped. Several scholars and critics have agreed with this assessment, adding that Carter's treatment of Native Americans plays into the romantic but racist concept of the "Noble Savage".

In 1985, The University of New Mexico Press bought rights to The Education of Little Tree from original publisher Delacorte Press. By its second year, the new paperback edition began to sell briskly through word-of-mouth publicity, with sales eventually surpassing 600,000.[25] Though Carter's background as Asa Carter was discussed in academic circles, it was not widely known (despite the 1976 Times article) by the book-buying public. In 1991, after the book won the American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) award and was number 1 on the New York Times non-fiction paperback best-seller list for several weeks.

On October 4, 1991, Dan T. Carter (a history professor and distant cousin of Asa Carter) published the article "The Transformation of a Klansman" in the New York Times. This article once again shed light on Asa Carter's dual identity and prompted The Times to shift the book onto its fiction best-seller list.[26] Scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. also wrote an article on Carter and Little Tree for The Times that appeared in November, 1991.[27]

In 1997, a film adaptation of Little Tree was released, and once again Asa Carter was in the national spotlight. Carter's widow, India Carter, refused most interview requests during these years,[28] though she did confirm to Publisher's Weekly in 1991 that Forrest and Asa were the same person.[29] 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. I honestly don't see the point of all this nasty gossip dragged out years ago."[30]

The University of New Mexico Press did eventually change the cover of Little Tree following the 1991 publicity, removing the "True Story" subtitle and adding a fiction classification label, though the biographical material in the introduction has never been updated to include details of Carter's involvement with segregationist politics and the Ku Klux Klan. Little Tree has continued to find readers and a place on reading lists for young adults since 1991. For fans who know of the controversy, many take the position of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who argued that Little Tree can be appreciated for its message of tolerance and its other qualities despite the biography of its creator. Richard Friedenberg, who wrote and directed the 1997 film adaptation, is also a defender of the book, but not the author:

Mr. Friedenberg said what appealed to him about the book was that "the characters and milieu they were in represented everything that was good about America and everything that was bad." On the one hand, he said, the book dealt with the strength of the family and not necessarily with traditional families. On the other hand, he said, it dealt with ignorance and prejudice. Mr. Friedenberg said he found it perplexing and almost impossible to understand Mr. Carter's motives and literary ambitions. Although Mr. Carter, who wrote four books, failed to address the issue of his bigotry publicly, Mr. Friedenberg said he believed that "his apology was in his literature." For example, he said, the handful of blacks and Jews in his books are depicted sympathetically. "The bad guys are almost, without fail, rich whites, politicians and phony preachers," Mr. Friedenberg said.[31]

Oprah Winfrey, who in 1994 endorsed Little Tree, subsequently removed it from her list of recommended book titles: "I no longer--even though I had been moved by the story--felt the same about this book," Winfrey said in 1994. "There's a part of me that said, `Well, OK, if a person has two sides of them and can write this wonderful story and also write the segregation forever speech, maybe that's OK.' But I couldn't--I couldn't live with that."[32] The book has also come in for criticism on literary grounds: "'I am surprised, of course, that Winfrey would recommend it,' says Lorene Roy, president of the American Library Association. 'Besides the questions about the author's identity, the book is known for a simplistic plot that used a lot of stereotypical imagery.'"[33]

Bibliography

Books by Forrest Carter

  • The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (Whipporwill Pub., 1973, republished by Delacorte in 1975 as Gone to Texas and by Dell in 1980 as The Outlaw Josey Wales).
  • The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales (Delacorte Press, 1976)
  • The Education of Little Tree (Delacorte Press, 1976)
  • Watch for Me on the Mountain (Delacorte Press, 1978, republished by Dell in 1980 as Cry Geronimo!)

Books about Carter's faking of ethnicity

  • Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (Laura Browder, 2003)
  • Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Shari M Huhndorf, 2004)
  • Native American Fiction: A User's Guide (David Treuer, 2006)

Articles about Carter's faking of ethnicity

Notes

  1. ^ Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1997. (p.114)
  2. ^ Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1997. (p.114)
  3. ^ Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1997. (p.116)
  4. ^ "Segregationist Wants Ban on 'Rock and Roll'". New York Times, March 30, 1956
  5. ^ "Bias Instigator Gets Year in Jail", New York Times, September 1, 1956
  6. ^ "Integration Troubles". New York Times, September 2, 1956
  7. ^ "Suspect and 4 Seized". New York Times, January 28, 1957.
  8. ^ Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1997. (p.116)
  9. ^ Barra, Allen. "The Education of Little Fraud". Salon.com, December 20, 2001.
  10. ^ Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1997. (p.115)
  11. ^ Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1997. (p.115)
  12. ^ Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1997. (p.115)
  13. ^ Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1997. (p.114)
  14. ^ Salon.com Books | The education of Little Fraud
  15. ^ Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1997. (p.115)
  16. ^ Greenshaw, Wayne. "Is Forrest Carter Really Asa Carter? Only Josey Wales May Know for Sure" New York Times, August 26, 1976
  17. ^ Salon.com Books | The education of Little Fraud
  18. ^ Greenshaw, Wayne. "Is Forrest Carter Really Asa Carter? Only Josey Wales May Know for Sure" New York Times, August 26, 1976
  19. ^ Handbook of Texas Online - CARTER, ASA EARL
  20. ^ Handbook of Texas Online - CARTER, ASA EARL
  21. ^ Salon.com Books | The education of Little Fraud
  22. ^ Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1997. (p.117)
  23. ^ Greenshaw, Wayne. "Is Forrest Carter Really Asa Carter? Only Josey Wales May Know for Sure" New York Times, August 26, 1976
  24. ^ Barra, Allen. "The Education of Little Fraud". Salon.com, December 20, 2001.
  25. ^ Weinraub, Bernard. "Movie With a Murky Background: The Man Who Wrote the Book". New York Times, December 17, 1997.
  26. ^ Carter, Dan T. "The Transformation of a Klansman". New York Times, October 4, 1991.
  27. ^ Gates, Henry Louis Jr. "'Authenticity', or the Lesson of Little Tree". New York Times Book Review, November 24, 1991)
  28. ^ Weinraub, Bernard. "Movie With a Murky Background: The Man Who Wrote the Book". New York Times, December 17, 1997.
  29. ^ Reid, Calvin. "Widow of 'Little Tree' Author Admits He Changed Identity." Publishers Weekly October 25, 1991.
  30. ^ Weinraub, Bernard. "Movie With a Murky Background: The Man Who Wrote the Book". New York Times, December 17, 1997.
  31. ^ Weinraub, Bernard. "Movie With a Murky Background: The Man Who Wrote the Book". New York Times, December 17, 1997.
  32. ^ Italie, Hillel. "Disputed Book Pulled From Oprah Web Site". Associated Press, November 6, 2007.
  33. ^ Italie, Hillel. "Disputed Book Pulled From Oprah Web Site". Associated Press, November 6, 2007.

Treuer, David. Media:"Going Native: Why Do Writers Pretend to be Indians?" Slate.com. 7 March 2008.

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