Ann Waldron - Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist

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Hodding Carter

The Reconstruction of a Racist

Ann Waldron

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Published by

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Post Office Box 2225

Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of

Workman Publishing

225 Varick Street

New York, New York 10014

1993 by Ann Waldron.

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

e-ISBN 9781616202859

To the memory of Martin Waldron, newspaperman

Contents

[Greenville was] the most urbane and progressive city in Mississippi an oasis in the racial strife and obsession that smothered the rest of Mississippi. Strict segregation prevailed, but there was an atmosphere of harmony and respect for basic rights that did not exist elsewhere. It was a main ingredient of the economic progress of the town. The moving force behind the spirit of Greenville was Hodding Carter, and his newspaper the Delta Democrat-Times.

Frank Smith, Congressman from Mississippi

Introduction

W hen I said I wanted to write a book about a southern white liberal during the civil rights revolution, more than one person asked me, Were there any?

Indeed there were white liberals in those years from 1954 through 1964, when the South was the battleground for diehard white segregationists on one side and frustrated African-Americans at last demanding basic rights on the other. To defend their way of life, a squalid, outmoded, totally reprehensible dehumanization of a whole race, segregationists used every weapon they could muster, from lunatic legal schemes such as interposition, to bombs. Backed up by the law of the land, including the 1954 ruling of the United States Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in the public schools, black and northern white civil rights leaders battled on. Caught in the middle were southern white liberals. They were reviled by their white neighbors, scorned by northern liberals, and abandoned by the black activists who took over the civil rights movement.

Some of them paid personally a heavy price for their liberalism. LeRoy Collins, a former governor of Florida who headed the U.S. Office of Civil Rights under Lyndon Johnson, was present at the 1965 Selma march; he was defeated afterward when he ran for the U.S. Senate. Clifford and Virginia Durr, of Montgomery, Alabama, were exiled from the white society in whose highest echelons they had grown up, and they faced real financial hardship when Durr lost all of his white legal clients. Charles Morgan, who spoke out against a church bombing in Birmingham, was forced out of town and went to work for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C. The handful of southern newspaper editors who took a moderate, or reasonable, stand on civil rights faced threats and endured the hostility of their neighbors, only to have the next generation turn on them for having been too slow.

I knew this much, but I learned much more as I researched the life of William Hodding Carter, Jr., editor and publisher of the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi, who died in 1972. I marveled at Carters long, spectacular journey from his childhood in a segregated Louisiana to the lonely place where he was almost the only voice of reason in Mississippi during the early days of the racial revolution and eventually the Souths most celebrated spokesman for racial justice. I could hardly believe the day-to-day horror of his lifethreats, ridicule, insults, boycottsas he conscientiously goaded fellow Mississippians on racial matters and they, in turn, tried to isolate him socially and run his newspaper out of business, and even threatened to kill him.

To understand the depth of his courage it is necessary to examine the context in which he acted. One might ask: What was so great about running a picture of Jesse Owens in a newspaper in the thirties? It was great because in the thirties no southern newspaper (and not all northern newspapers) ran pictures of black peopleit was one of the ways in which white society kept blacks invisible. What was so brave about editorializing, on the day the Supreme Court ruled against segregation in the public schools, that it was the only decent thing the Court could do? It was brave because almost all white Mississippians vowed that blood would flow before they would integrate their public schools, and detested anyone who dared suggest that integration was even thinkable. Why make a fuss about a man who editorially supported President Eisenhower when he sent federal troops to Little Rock to guarantee the safety of black students attending formerly all-white schools? Such a man deserves a fuss, because he incurred the wrath of his neighbors for supporting this kind of law and order. So he attacked White Citizens Councilsdidnt everyone? Not at all. Many Mississippi newspapers supported them, and legislators, doctors, lawyers, and mayors of towns and cities joined them. Hodding Carter came out in favor of integration in colleges and universities in a place where and at a time when it was dangerous to hold such views. He was as brave as a kamikaze warrior, year after year writing articles and editorials that attacked racism and discrimination.

Yet he was honestly afraid that another civil war would erupt if Mississippi had to integrate its public schools in the 1960s. He was proved wrong on that count, but he was right about everything else. He displayed enormous courage when it probably would have been prudent to be less outspoken. Prudence is a word that was not in his vocabulary, and his imprudence is another name for sheer bravery under fire. He provided leadership and a rallying point for the younger people of Mississippi who were beginning to see the light and to realize that Mississippi had to join the United States in spirit as well as in fact. He was an example and an inspiration to newspaper men and women across the South who could look to Mississippiof all placesand see a newspaper publisher who could be liberal and still live. While it is true that outside forces integrated the state against its will, those outside forces who brought the victory would have had an even tougher timeand might not have succeededwithout Hodding Carters solitary voice of reason.

19231927

I Said I Was Prejudiced

W illiam Hodding Carter, Jr., was a racist when he entered Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, in the fall of 1923. When he graduated four years later, he was still a bigot, but he had received what he called some healthy jolts that challenged for the first time the received wisdom of his childhood, the folklore, mores, inherited certainties of the South.

Sixteen years old, bright, charming, and handsome, with dark eyes and black curly hair, the quintessential young southern gentleman, Hodding had grown up in the little town of Hammond, Louisiana. He was one of only two southerners in the freshman class of 181 young men, and was at Bowdoin because his first cousin, Hamilton Hall, a junior from Camden, Maine, whom Hodding regarded as a man of the world, had talked him out of going to the University of Virginia.

In May 1923, the principal of Hammond High School had sent Hoddings transcript to Bowdoin with a letter stating that Hodding was the best, the top boy in every sense, in the Class of 1923. Hodding was admitted, in spite of a deficiency in Latin, and four months later he could write to his high school friend Maxine Carr, My college life has