Hodding Carter

May 31, 1993
Former Southern journalist Waldron provides a solid, though unstylish, 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. While Waldron sympathetically describes Carter's delicate position, she offers little psychological insight into his character.

June 1, 1993
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. ((Reviewed June 1993))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1993, American Library Association.)