Asa Earl Carter (September 4, 1925 – June 7, 1979) was an American segregationist and Ku Klux Klan organizer who was prominent in the 1950s for his activism and later as a Western fiction novelist. He was particularly known for his work as a co-writer of George Wallace's well-known pro-segregation line of 1963, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." He ran in the Democratic primary for governor of Alabama as a white supremacist. Later, under the pseudonym of supposedly Cherokee writer Forrest Carter, he wrote The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (1972), a Western novel that was adapted into a 1976 film featuring Clint Eastwood that was added to 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 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, topping the Times paperback best-seller lists (both non-fiction and fiction) and winning 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. 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.
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. According to high school classmates interviewed by historian and journalist Dan T. Carter and The Anniston Star reporter Fred Burger during the 1990s and 2000s, he was popular among girls, excelled academically, and was considered a gifted actor. These classmates also stated that he rarely talked about racial matters or politics in general. Carter graduated from Oxford High School in May 1943.
Carter served in the United States Navy during World War II, working as a radio operator on the attack transport Appling. During his time in service, the Office of Naval Intelligence investigated a group of sailors on the ship who were regularly meeting to read and discuss American pro-fascist writers such as Gerald L. K. Smith, Gerald Burton Winrod, Father Charles Coughlin, and William Dudley Pelley. Dan T. Carter argues that this reading group played a key part in Carter's political development. Carter was an active member of the group, and many of his views aligned closely with Smith's. According to Larry Carter, one of Asa Carter's brothers, Carter rarely discussed politics before his time in the Navy, but afterwards, he could speak at length about Smith and other far-right activists and even encouraged Larry to read Mein Kampf.
After serving in the Navy, he studied journalism for a year 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, Alabama.
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. 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. 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.
In April 1956, members of Carter's new KKK group attacked singer Nat King Cole on stage at a Birmingham concert. In September 1957, six members of Carter's Klan group abducted and attacked 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. Four of the six involved were convicted of mayhem and sentenced to 20 years, but in 1963, a parole board, appointed by Carter's then-employer Alabama governor George Wallace, commuted their sentences.
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.