Dan Carter, now retired from the University of South Carolina, is one of the most reliable analysts of racial issues in the South. His books on the Scottsboro Boys, on Wallace and the “politics of rage” are landmarks. Again, with this thoroughly researched study of Asa Carter—no relation—he has laid it all out. Some of the early chapters cover events that many readers will already know: the Birmingham bombings, the heroism of Reverend Shuttlesworth, the activities of different KKK units in Alabama in the sixties.
His point, however, is that Asa Carter, born in September 1925 in Calhoun County, was involved, directly or tangentially, with a great deal of it, especially with the grotesque assault and castration of Judge Edward Arone (Judge was his given first name). A devout, fanatical white supremacist, Carter joined and even organized new Klan units. Carter’s bigotry, Dan Carter suggests, was nourished by the community, his school history texts, the “Lost Cause” rhetoric. Asa was also rabidly antisemitic, and Dan Carter reminds the reader that this hatred of Jews was wide and deep in America, especially in the South.
Carter was, nevertheless, a very bright fellow, an avid reader, and an articulate and persuasive talker, even something of an actor. He had some success as a radio DJ, announcer, and then right-wing commentator. The apex of his career of course was as a speechwriter for George Wallace, supplying his first inaugural speech with the line “Segregation today…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever.”
Dismissed from Wallace’s service, Carter, a skilled writer, then made a most remarkable turn. He lost weight, got a deep tan, and reinvented himself as Forrest Carter, claiming to be half Cherokee, raised in east Tennessee. As Forrest, he wrote several books including “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” made into a very successful movie starring Clint Eastwood, a fictional biography of Geronimo and, most astonishingly, “The Education of Little Tree,” a fraudulent Indian memoir and bestseller.
Some homefolks knew, but Carter fooled publishers, agents, and on television, Barbara Walters. Dee Brown, author of “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” said of the Geronimo book it came “as close as any ever will come to recreating the real Geronimo.” Carter was a thriving fraud, and might have gone on much longer, but his growing alcoholism caused erratic and violent behavior and colleagues, friends, even family avoided him. He died a violent death in 1979.
Why had Asa Carter been fired by Gov. George Wallace, you might ask. Wallace’s national presidential campaigns, with speeches all over the north, made use of coded language, veiled racism, not the straightforward bigotry of Carter’s speeches. Carter had become a potential embarrassment to George Wallace.
