Asa Earl Carter (September 4, 1925 – June 7, 1979) was a wild Ku Klux Klan leader, segregationist speech writer, and later famed western novelist. He was most notable for publishing novels and a best-selling, award-winning memoir under the name Forrest Carter, an identity as a Native American Cherokee. In 1976, following the publication success of his western The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, The New York Times revealed Forrest Carter to be Southerner Asa Earl Carter. His background became national news again in 1991 after his purported 1976 memoir, The Education of Little Tree, was re-issued in paperback and topped the Times paperback best-seller lists (both non-fiction and fiction). It also won the American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) award.

Prior to his literary career as "Forrest", Carter was politically active for years in Alabama as an opponent of the civil rights movement: he worked as a speechwriter for segregationist Governor George Wallace of Alabama; founded the North Alabama Citizens Council (NACC), an independent offshoot of the White Citizens' Council movement, and an independent Ku Klux Klan group, and started a pro-segregation monthly entitled The Southerner.

Early life

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

Carter served in the United States Navy during World War II, and for a year studied journalism at the University of Colorado on the GI bill. After the war, he married India Thelma Walker. The couple settled in Birmingham, Alabama and had four children.

Career

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 syndicated to more than 20 radio stations before the show was cancelled. Carter was fired following community outrage about his broadcasts and a boycott of WILD. Carter broke with the leadership of the Alabama Citizen's Council movement over the incident. He refused to tone down his anti-Semitic rhetoric, while the Citizen's Council preferred to focus more narrowly on preserving racial segregation of Blacks.

Carter started a renegade group called the North Alabama Citizen's Council. In addition to his careers in broadcasting and politics, Carter during these years ran a filling station.[2]:116 By March 1956, Carter was making national news as a spokesman for segregation. Carter was quoted in a UP newswire story, saying the NAACP had "infiltrated" Southern white teenagers with "immoral" rock and roll records. Carter called for jukebox owners to purge all records by black performers from jukeboxes.

Carter made the national news again on September 1 and 2 of the same year, after he gave an inflammatory anti-integration speech in Clinton, Tennessee. He addressed Clinton's high school enrolling twelve black students. After Carter's speech, an aroused mob of 200 white men stopped black drivers passing through, "ripping out hood ornaments and smashing windows". They were heading for the house of the mayor before being turned back by the local Sheriff. Carter appeared in Clinton alongside segregationist John Kasper, who was charged later that same month with sedition and inciting a riot for his activities that day. Later that year, Carter ran for Police Commissioner against former office holder Bull Connor, who won the election. Connor later became nationally famous for his heavy-handed approach to law enforcement during the civil rights struggles in Birmingham.

In 1957, Carter and his brother James were jailed for fighting against Birmingham police officers. The police were trying to apprehend another of the six in their group, who was wanted for a suspected Ku Klux Klan (KKK) shooting. Also during the mid-1950s, Carter founded a paramilitary KKK splinter group called the "Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy".[7] Carter started a monthly publication entitled The Southerner, devoted to purportedly scientific theories of white racial superiority, as well as to anti-communist rhetoric.

Members of Carter's new KKK group attacked singer Nat King Cole at an April 1956 Birmingham concert. After a more violent event, four members of Carter's Klan group were convicted of a September 1957 abduction and attack on a black handyman named Judge Edward Aaron. They castrated Aaron, poured turpentine on his wounds, and left him abandoned in the trunk of a car near Springdale, Alabama. Police found Aaron, near death from blood loss. (Carter was not with the men who carried out this attack). In 1958, Carter quit the Klan group he had founded after shooting two members in a dispute over finances. Birmingham police filed attempted murder charges against Carter, but the charges were subsequently dropped. Carter also ran a campaign for Lieutenant Governor the same year that saw him finish fifth in a field of five. 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. During the 1960s, Carter was a speechwriter for Wallace. He was one of two men credited with Wallace's famous slogan, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever", part of his 1963 inaugural speech. Carter continued to work for Wallace. After Wallace's wife Lurleen was elected Governor of Alabama in 1966, Carter worked for her.[8] 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."

When Wallace decided to enter national politics with a 1968 presidential run, he did not invite Carter on board for the campaign. He sought to tone down his 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. He finished last in a field of five candidates, winning only 1.51% of the vote in an election narrowly won by Wallace over the more moderate Governor Albert Brewer. At Wallace's 1971 inauguration, Carter and some of his supporters demonstrated against him, carrying signs reading "Wallace is a bigot" and "Free our white children". The demonstration was the last notable public appearance by "Asa Carter".

Literary career and death

After losing the election, Carter relocated to Sweetwater, Texas,[9] where he started over. He began work on his first novel, spending 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. There Carter completed a sequel to his first novel, as well as two books on American Indian themes. Carter separated from his wife, who remained in Florida. In the late 1970s, he relocated to Abilene, Texas.

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), originally published as a memoir. The latter sold modestly – as fiction – during Carter's life. It became a sleeper hit in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s.

Clint Eastwood directed and starred in a 1976 film adaptation of Josey Wales, retitled The Outlaw Josey Wales after the book was sent to his offices by Carter as an unsolicited submission and Eastwood's partner read and put his support behind it. At this time, neither man knew of Carter's past as a Klansman and rabid segregationist. In 1997, after the success of the paperback edition of The Education of Little Tree, a film adaptation was produced. Originally intended as a made-for-TV movie, it was given a theatrical release.

In 1978, Carter published Watch for Me on the Mountain, a fictionalized biography of Geronimo. (It was reprinted in 1980 in an edition titled, Cry Geronimo!)

Carter was working on The Wanderings of Little Tree, a sequel to The Education of Little Tree, as well as a screenplay version of the book, when he died in Abilene on June 7, 1979. The cause of death was reported as heart failure, but alleged to have resulted from a fistfight with his son. Carter's body was returned to Alabama for burial near Anniston. No family members attended his funeral.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asa_Earl_Carter

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Asa Carter (1925-1979) is remembered as a promoter of white supremacist views, especially in his role as a speech writer for Alabama governor George C. Wallace; he is responsible for Wallace's infamous 1963 inaugural speech, which included the line "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!" After an unsuccessful run for governor in 1970, he left the state and took on a new identity as Bedford Forrest Carter, authoring several Western adventure novels popularized by Hollywood, most notably as The Outlaw Josey Wales. He also wrote a nationally acclaimed work for young readers, The Education of Little Tree, which he claimed as autobiographical but was later exposed as a hoax.

Asa Earl Carter, second son of the four children of Ralph and Hermione Carter, was born in Oxford, near Anniston in Calhoun County, on September 4, 1925. He graduated from Calhoun County High School in 1943. Carter served in the U.S. Navy from May 1943 to March 1946 and then married his high-school sweetheart, India Thelma Walker, with whom he had four children. Carter studied journalism at the University of Colorado, and then returned with his family to Birmingham, where he pursued a career in radio. In 1953, he began working as a commentator at Birmingham radio station WILD, broadcasting anti-Semitic and racist speeches to an audience who already adamantly opposed the expanding civil rights movement in Birmingham. Carter also wrote and published The Southerner, a white supremacist magazine, during the 1950s. In addition to his hate-filled broadcasts, Carter also joined with a group of men to found a white supremacist paramilitary organization, the original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy. Members of the group (although not in the company of Carter) were responsible for beating singer Nat "King" Cole in Birmingham in 1956 and for the castration of an African American man in 1957. That same year, Carter was charged in the shooting of two other members of his Klan group over monetary disputes, but the charges were eventually dropped.

In the early 1960s, Carter began working as a speech writer for Wallace and continued in that capacity when Wallace's wife, Lurleen, took office. While enjoying the support that Carter's white supremacist speeches garnered, Wallace kept his connection with Carter out of the public eye and often publicly denied Carter's hand in writing them. In the 1968 gubernatorial race, Carter broke his ties with Wallace because of what he viewed as a toning-down of Wallace's racist rhetoric. Carter then ran for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1970, using thinly veiled racist language and imagery, such as using "busing" as a code word for "integration," to garner support. He lost badly to the more moderate Wallace.

Carter moved to Florida in 1973 and soon after changed his name to Bedford Forrest Carter in honor of Confederate general and early Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest. He and his wife then moved to Abilene, Texas, where he began working on what would become his first novel, Gone to Texas (originally published as The Rebel Outlaw, Josey Wales in 1973). In it, Carter introduces the character Josey Wales, a former Confederate soldier who also would be the protagonist of Carter's second novel, The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales (1976). Both tell tales of revenge and resistance to governmental authority. Wales is consistent in mindset with disillusioned segregationists and states' rights advocates, refusing to surrender after the Civil War and attempts to evade the pro-Union guerillas who killed his family and who seek to bring him to justice for waging guerilla warfare on federal troops. In 1976, Clint Eastwood played the lead in the film The Outlaw Josey Wales, which was based on the two books. In these novels, Carter depicts southerners and Indians as honorable and loyal, in contrast to the Union forces and the federal government, who are domineering and remorseless in their behavior towards the former Confederacy. In Watch for Me on the Mountain (1978), a bloody tale of desert survival and guerilla tactics, Apache leader Geronimo seeks revenge after his family is massacred by soldiers. Like Wales, Geronimo is driven to kill by outside forces.

Carter achieved his greatest fame with a very different kind of book. His novel The Education of Little Tree (1976) is a coming-of-age tale filled with criticisms of institutionalized religion and politics. Its protagonist, Little Tree, a young orphaned Cherokee boy, experiences the bigotry and deceit of church officials and politicians. Carter falsely claimed the account was autobiographical. It was reviewed widely and praised greatly.

In 1976, Carter drew media scrutiny after the film, The Outlaw Josey Wales, was released, and a few journalists made the connection between Forrest Carter and Asa Carter, most notably Alabama author and journalist Wayne Greenhaw in an editorial in The New York Times in August of that year. Carter's brother, Doug, maintained that they had never been Klan members and had belonged only to groups promoting segregation and states' rights. Carter, however, continued to promote the hoax that he was Forrest Carter and in no way connected with Asa Carter, a story unknowingly promoted by his agent and many members of the news media. Carter's fabricated persona was exposed even further when he appeared in an interview with Barbara Walters on the Today Show in 1976 and was recognized by former friends and associates in Alabama. He continued to maintain the pretense of being Forrest Carter and in some interviews came to refer to Asa Carter as his "no good" brother.

In June 1979, he was traveling from Texas to Los Angeles to discuss the possibility of a film version of Watch for Me on the Mountain. Several publications reported that he had been drinking when he stopped by his son's home near Abilene on the night of June 7; he started a fight and fell, hitting his head on a counter. Emergency medical staff who arrived on the scene found him dead, apparently having choked to death on his own vomit. His body was returned to Alabama for burial in the cemetery of the DeArmanville Methodist Church, east of Oxford.

Works by Asa Carter (Forrest Carter)

Gone to Texas (1975)

The Education of Little Tree (1976)

The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales (1978)

Watch for Me on the Mountain (1978)

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/98777566/asa-earl-carter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asa_Earl_Carter

Asa Earl Carter (September 4, 1925 – June 7, 1979) was a 1950s segregationist speech writer, and later Western novelist. He co-wrote George Wallace's well-known pro-segregation line of 1963, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever", and ran in the Democratic primary for governor of Alabama on a segregationist ticket. Years later, under the alias of supposedly Cherokee writer Forrest Carter, he wrote The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (1972), a Western novel that led to a 1976 film featuring Clint Eastwood that was adopted into the National Film Registry, and The Education of Little Tree (1976), a best-selling, award-winning book which was marketed as a memoir but which turned out to be fiction.

In 1976, following the success of The Rebel Outlaw and its film adaptation, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), The New York Times revealed Forrest Carter was actually Southerner Asa Carter. His background became national news again in 1991 after his purported memoir, The Education of Little Tree (1976), was re-issued in paperback, topped the Times paperback best-seller lists (both non-fiction and fiction), and won the American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) award.

Prior to his literary career as "Forrest", Carter was politically active for years in Alabama as an opponent of the civil rights movement: he worked as a speech writer for segregationist Governor George Wallace of Alabama, founded the North Alabama Citizens Council (NACC) – an independent offshoot of the White Citizens' Council movement – and an independent Ku Klux Klan group, and started a pro-segregation monthly titled The Southerner.

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Asa Earl Carter [pseud. Bedford Forrest Carter], segregationist, politician, speech-writer, and novelist, one of five children of Ralph and Hermione (Weatherly) Carter, was born in Anniston, Alabama, on September 4, 1925, and lived near Oxford. He attended schools in Calhoun County, Alabama. He married India Thelma Walker and had four children. Carter served in the United States Navy during World War II and later returned to the University of Colorado, where he attended naval training school in 1944. By the late 1950s he was in Birmingham, Alabama, where his political activities included hosting a radio show for the American States Rights Association and providing leadership in the Alabama Council movement. Later he founded the North Alabama White Citizens Council in Birmingham. He wrote speeches for Lurleen Wallace when she ran successfully for the governorship of Alabama in 1966 and was one of two writers said to be responsible for the words "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" uttered by Governor George Wallace. Although Carter is associated by the media with George Wallace and publicly claimed that he wrote speeches for Wallace in the 1960s, Wallace denied any association or collaboration. Carter ran unsuccessfully against Wallace in the Democratic primary for governor in 1970.

After his loss to Wallace, Carter gave up politics and left Alabama. He adopted the pseudonym Bedford Forrest Carter and assumed the role of a largely self-taught, part-Cherokee novelist named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, the colorful, uneducated Confederate general. Carter also wrote several books using a Cherokee Indian name, Gundi Usdi, which he translated as Little Tree. So complete was his break with his old life that it was not widely known until after his death that the novelist and the former politician were the same man. By 1972 Carter was in Sweetwater, Texas, where he used the resources of the City-County Library to work on his first novel, Gone to Texas (1973). The highly successful film version starring Clint Eastwood is entitled The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). Carter's residence during the writing of his three other books was St. George's Island, Florida. These books are The Vengeance Trial of Josey Wales (1976), a sequel to his first novel; The Education of Little Tree (1976, reprint 1986), a purported autobiography of his early years, considered his best book; and Watch for Me on the Mountain (1978), a sympathetic portrayal of Geronimo. Carter received various honors, one of which was an appearance at a Wellesley luncheon in Dallas in 1978 with J. Lon Tinkle, Barbara Tuchman, and Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey. Carter was a masterful storyteller whose prose style is characterized by sparsely phrased, often fragmentary sentences and fast-paced plot. The influence of the Civil War and his Cherokee heritage are evident, and from these he drew his themes of courage, honor, kinship, and blood-feud. He spent his last years traveling to promote his books, attempting to arrange for films of the last three of them, writing the screenplay for one himself, and composing The Wanderings of Little Tree, an unfinished sequel to his third book. In addition, Bruce Marshall, an artist from Austin, prepared illustrations for a volume of Carter's poetry. All of these efforts collapsed with Carter's untimely death. In Abilene, Texas, on June 7, 1979, he choked on food and clotted blood after a fistfight, and died; he is buried near Anniston, Alabama.