Asa Earl Carter

Asa Earl Carter (September 4, 1925 – June 7, 1979) was a 1950s segregationist political activist, Ku Klux Klan organizer, and later Western novelist.

Asa Carter was born in Anniston, 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 Hermione and Ralph 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 at Boulder on the G.I. Bill.

After the war, he married India Thelma Walker.

The couple settled in Birmingham, Alabama and had four children.

His children were Ralph Walker Carter, Asa Earl Carter, both of Abilene, and Bedford Forrest Carter of Alabama; one daughter, India Lara Morgan of Jacksonville, Ala.

In the mid 1950s, he had a syndicated segregationist radio show, and worked as a speech writer for segregationist Governor George Wallace of Alabama.

He also founded the North Alabama Citizens Council (NACC), an independent offshoot of the White Citizens' Council movement formed by Carter when the White Citizens' Council tried to moderate Carter's antisemitism.

He also formed the militant and violent Ku Klux Klan group known as the Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy, and started a monthly publication titled The Southerner which spread white supremacist and anti-communist rhetoric.

Also during the mid-1950s, Carter founded a paramilitary KKK splinter group, called the "Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy".

Carter started a monthly publication entitled The Southerner, devoted to purportedly scientific theories of white racial superiority, as well as to anti-communist rhetoric.

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 States Rights Association, were syndicated to more than 20 radio stations before the show was cancelled.

Carter was fired following community outrage over his attacks on National Brotherhood Week, which promoted friendship with the Jewish community, and a boycott of WILD.

Carter broke with the leadership of the Alabama Citizens' Council movement over the incident.

He refused to reduce his antisemitic rhetoric, and the Citizens' Council preferred to focus on preserving racial segregation against African Americans.

Carter started a renegade group called the North Alabama Citizens' Council.

In addition to his careers in broadcasting and politics, Carter during these years ran a filling station.

By March 1956, he was making national news as a spokesman for segregation.

Carter was quoted by United Press International 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 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 enrollment of 12 black students, and after his 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.

In April 1956 members of Carter's new KKK group attacked singer Nat King Cole on stage at a Birmingham concert.

Later that year, Carter ran for a position on the Birmingham City Commission as the Commissioner For Public Safety against former office holder Eugene "Bull" Connor, who won that election in 1957.

As with most elections during this time of poll taxes and segregation, the only competitive campaigning was done for the Democratic Party primary.

Connor later became nationally famous for his heavy-handed approach to law enforcement during the civil rights struggles in Birmingham.

Carter siphoned away some of the "white lower-status vote" from Connor, but finished a distant last in the primary, an indication that his style was becoming unacceptable to Alabama's "'respectable' segregationists."

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.

The two men were both later found guilty of disorderly conduct and interfering with an officer and each fined $25.

In September 1957, six members of Carter's Klan group abducted and attacked a black handyman named Judge Edward Aaron.

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 white supremacist ticket.

Years later, under the pseudonym 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 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.