Ann Waldron

The editor and publisher of the Delta Democrat-Times liked a good fight. Using his little daily paper to battle for equality before the law and an end to mistreatment of black people, Hodding Carter took on the power structure of the state of Mississippi. Castigated by politicians, denounced by his fellow editors, threatened with economic reprisal and physical violence, he drew the wrath of everyone from the country club to the crossroads store. White Citizens Councils anathematized him. The Ku Klux Klan sent him threatening messages. What kind of a man was this who stuck to his guns - for a time he even kept a gun close by - for what he believed, in the face of anger and vitriol, detestation and denunciation?

In Hodding Carter, Ann Waldron tells the story of a colorful, complex, combative man who spent much of his life on the unpopular sides of political and social issues. As a youth sent off to college in Maine, he was an outspoken white supremacist; he began changing his mind only when he came back home to the South to live. Nor was his battle for racial justice in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s his first fight against heavy odds: in the early 1930s, as editor of a tiny newspaper in Hammond, Louisiana, he fought the Louisiana Kingfish, Huey Long, and his powerful machine.

Nor did Carter confine his writing to newspaper journalism. He wrote books, magazine articles, history, novels, poetry. Married to a woman who was equally courageous and who stood loyally and firmly with him in his outspoken, unpopular stands, he was passionate, creative, greatly complicated. His friends cherished him, his opponents abhorred him. No uncritical eulogy, Hodding Carter re-creates the passionate life, public and private, of a flawed but authentic American hero.

From Publisher's Weekly:
Former Southern journalist Waldron provides a solid . . . biography of Hodding Carter (1907-1972), the courageous editor of the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times , Mississippi's most liberal newspaper during the Civil Rights era. Using a wealth of sources, Waldron (Close Connections: Caroline Gordon and the Southern Renaissance) documents the Lousiana-born Carter's evolution from teenage bigot to Huey Long opponent and his role, beginning in 1935, as editor of the incorruptible newspaper funded in part by Greenville leading light William Alexander Percy (adoptive father of novelist Walker Percy). Carter strained local mores by criticizing lynching and printing a photograph of black Olympian Jesse Owens; he argued in articles and books that Southern whites, not blacks or Northerners, had to change themselves. A 1946 Pulitzer Prize-winner for editorial writing, Carter crusaded for racial equality, but hedged on condemning segregation; after the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v . Board of Education decision, he attacked intransigent Citizens' Councils, but supported only gradual integration.

From Mary Carroll - BookList:
Telling the story of W. Hodding Carter, Jr. (1907-1972), founder/editor of Greenville, Mississippi's respected "Delta Democrat-Times" and a rare southern liberal during the middle years of this century, requires that Waldron "reconstruct" the context of a period most Americans have forgotten. The Louisiana-born Carter was surely a racist when he moved to a different dormitory at Bowdoin so he wouldn't have to sleep under the same roof with the college's only black student. To modern eyes, Carter may have remained a racist in the 1940s and early 1950s--when he insisted that segregation could be preserved only by making Jim Crow facilities truly equal--and in the later 1950s and early 1960s--when he opposed both NAACP lawsuits and White Citizens Council pressure, and supported integration at the college level but continued to believe that integration of elementary and secondary schools would tear the nation apart. Even these moderate views, however, made Carter a dangerous renegade in Mississippi, and subjected his newspaper--and his family--to threats and boycotts. Carter was a larger-than-life figure; journalist and children's book author Waldron draws on solid research and lengthy interviews with Carter's family and friends to capture the triumphs and tragedies of an embattled and principled moderate in a demanding time.

From Claude Sitton - The New York Times Book Review:
Ann Waldron outlines in rich and intriguing detail the price paid by the editor for questioning the tradition of white supremacy. . . . The book follows Carter's emergence as a thoughtful and courageous voice of the South, someone always eager to do battle with words or even fists, if occasionally distracted by his love of travel, writing and other ventures. Ms. Waldron . . . recognizes that readers of today will ask how an editor who opposed enactment of a Federal antilynching law as unnecessary and public school desegregation in Mississippi as unwise can be called a champion of racial justice. The answer, which she gives in the book's introduction, lies in the context of the times. . . . Absent his efforts and those of other Southern editors of courage and likemind, change would have come far more slowly and at far greater cost. This book underscores an important truth about the past that is too often forgotten.