(In this book Carter deals with the race question, the "po...)
In this book Carter deals with the race question, the "political problem," and civil rights. Carter's views were radical for the day and so unpopular that he carried a pistol. Here, he gives his view of the South, as a legacy from the plantation system and the Civil War and its bitter aftermath.
So the Heffners Left McComb (Civil Rights in Mississippi Series)
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On Saturday, September 5, 1964, the family of Albert W....)
On Saturday, September 5, 1964, the family of Albert W. "Red" Heffner Jr., a successful insurance agent, left their house at 202 Shannon Drive in McComb, Mississippi, where they had lived for ten years. They never returned. In the eyes of neighbors, their unforgiveable sin was to have spoken on several occasions with civil rights workers and to have invited two into their home. Consequently, the Heffners were subjected to a campaign of harassment, ostracism, and economic retaliation shocking to a white family who believed that they were respected community members.
So the Heffners Left McComb, originally published in 1965 and reprinted now for the first time, is Greenville journalist Hodding Carter's account of the events that led to the Heffners' downfall. Historian Trent Brown, a McComb native, supplies a substantial introduction evaluating the book's significance. The Heffners' story demonstrates the forces of fear, conformity, communal pressure, and threats of retaliation that silenced so many white Mississippians during the 1950s and 1960s. Carter's book provides a valuable portrait of a family who was not choosing to make a stand, but merely extending humane hospitality. Yet the Heffners were systematically punished and driven into exile for what was perceived as treason against white apartheid.
(An anecdotal history of plumbing from the Harappan of 300...)
An anecdotal history of plumbing from the Harappan of 3000 B.C. to the modern world is a tribute to such engineering achievements as the lead pipes of the Roman empire, the sewers of London, and Japanese toilets. By the author of Stolen Water. 20,000 first printing.
William Hodding Carter, Jr. , was an American editor, publisher, and author, who regularly wrote editorials condemning racial, religious, and economic intolerance as well as editorials and essays on southern themes and historical and popular writing.
Background
William Hodding Carter, Jr. was born on February 3, 1907 in Hammond, Louisiana, United States; the son of William Hodding Carter, a locally prominent farmer and businessman in Tangipahoa Parish, and Irma Dutartre. Carter, named for his father, went by Hodding rather than Will, although he shared his father's sense of noblesse oblige, love for the land, and hatred of demagoguery. According to Carter, his youth formed many of his basic values. He learned Confederate and Ku Klux Klan lore as well as Christian humility from his Bible-quoting grandmother, and he learned common humanity from a black boyhood friend. The wrenching sight of a burned, hanging body of a lynch mob's victim that young Carter stumbled upon in the woods haunted him for the rest of his life.
Education
In 1923 Carter entered Bowdoin College, where, feeling isolated and defensive as the only southerner, he discovered that taking on prejudices was "good for the spirit. " He contributed essays, stories, and poems to campus publications and edited the college annual, the Bugle. After graduating with a B. A. in 1927, he studied journalism at Columbia University (1927 - 1928). During 1928 - 1929 Carter taught English at Tulane University.
Career
He worked as a reporter for the New Orleans Item in 1929, as night bureau manager for United Press in New Orleans in 1930, and then as bureau chief for Associated Press in Jackson, Miss. , from 1931 to 1932. In 1932 he was fired by the AP for "insubordination"; his former boss predicted Carter "would never make a newspaperman. " Carter returned to Hammond, La. , to prove otherwise. With the support of his father and help of his wife, Carter converted a throwaway mimeograph advertiser into a four-page tabloid daily known as the Hammond Daily Courier. The Carters kept the paper alive by trading advertising for rent, supplies, and even food. Carter fed his readers a steady diet of editorials attacking Senator Huey Long, whom Carter dubbed the "Crawfish" and likened to a corrupt carpetbagger of Reconstruction days. Carter also mobilized local political resistance to the Long political machine and support for Roosevelt's New Deal, which Long opposed. Carter's district was unique in never sending a Long supporter to Congress. By writing anti-Long articles for national magazines and newspapers, Carter gained widespread attention, but repeated physical threats and boycotts, a failed bid for the state legislature in 1935, and especially the loss of a state printing contract dispirited Carter, and Long's assassination in 1935 chastened him. It was time to leave Hammond. In 1936 he accepted an invitation from David Cohn and William Alexander Percy to set up and edit an independent newspaper in Greenville, Miss. , a Delta community that Carter came to love as an oasis of toleration and freedom. The Delta and the town became the axis of Carter's identity and interest. He wrote two novels (The Winds of Fear [1944] and Flood Crest [1947]) set in the Delta world he knew so intimately, as well as three histories (Lower Mississippi [1942], Gulf Coast Country [1951], and Man and the River: The Mississippi [1970]), a collection of poems (The Ballad of Catfood Grimes and Other Verse [1964]), and hundreds of articles from his stance as loving critic of the region and its people. With money from the sale of the Courier and $16, 000 from Percy, Cohn, and others, the Carters launched the Delta Star in 1936. Two years later Carter bought out his principal rival and formed the Delta Democrat-Times, his journalistic home until his death. In spring 1940 Carter went to Harvard as a Nieman Fellow, and in summer 1940 he took a leave of absence from the Delta Democrat-Times to become an editor of the experimental paper PM in New York. Uncomfortable with PM's left-leaning politics and angry with its antisouthern tone, Carter gladly left big-city journalism. In late 1940 his National Guard unit was called into federal service but while on maneuvers in Florida shortly before the war, he injured his right eye. The injury kept him from combat and eventually cost him sight in that eye. During the war, therefore, he edited a Guard divisional paper before being transferred to the War Department's Public Relations Bureau and then to military intelligence in Washington. In Washington Carter coauthored Civilian Defense of the United States (1942) for the government and finished Lower Mississippi. In 1943 he helped to start and edit the Middle East editions of Yank and Stars and Stripes in Cairo, Egypt, but he was reassigned to Washington in 1944 to work on psychological warfare. He remained there until his honorable discharge as a major in 1945. The years away from his native South and his involvement in selling the war against fascism led Carter to rethink some of the basic assumptions of southern culture. He came home committed to identifying "things wrong with the South, " none more so than race relations. Carter had already assayed the consequences of racial injustice in his novel, The Winds of Fear (1944). Set in a contemporary small southern town, the book reveals the consuming "hate and suspicion and intolerance" that lead to murder, rape, and riot following the death of a black soldier. Only the intervention of a moderate newspaperman and a minority of concerned citizens save the town from destruction. The novel's characters and themes seemed to predict Carter's own future.
He railed especially against Senator Theodore G. Bilbo, who personified demagoguery and racial prejudice and who was the thinly disguised subject of Carter's angry novel, Flood Crest, about Red- and race-baiting, the convict-lease system, and political abuses. The prize committee cited Carter's August 27, 1945, editorial, "Go for Broke, " arguing for fairness for returning Nisei soldiers, in particular.
The growing reputation that followed the award, along with his own writing for national periodicals, imbued Carter with a strong sense of responsibility to speak for as well as to the South. In his autobiographical musings Southern Legacy (1950) and Where Main Street Meets the River (1953), and later in his collection of essays, First Person Rural (1963), he both defended the region's distinctive clannish unity, individualism, personalism, sense of history and place, religiosity, and good manners, while he simultaneously scored it for the sins of racism and intolerance and the corruption of one-party politics. He also warned against federal government interference with southern folkways and institutions. Any such action would excite the subconsciously "guilt-ridden" white South to invoke the ghosts of Reconstruction to prevent any change from within or without. That the enduring myths of Reconstruction were real and powerful Carter had no doubt, as his own angry history of Reconstruction, The Angry Scar (1959), attested. The South, Carter repeatedly wrote, was a tangle of contradictions individualist in rights and conformist in social thinking, hospitable to yet suspicious of strangers, gentle in manner but violent in action that demanded patience from outsiders yet honest, immediate attention from southerners. Caught between his concern for maintaining the integrity of southern distinctiveness and his desire to end social injustice, Carter consistently distanced himself from national civil rights organizations. His emphasis on Christian brotherhood and the moral as well as legal obligations to blacks brought him close to condemning segregation, but almost alone among southern "liberals, " Carter opposed court-ordered desegregation. The Supreme Court's desegregation decision in 1954 was a personal as well as a national watershed. Although fearing its compulsory implications, Carter endorsed the decision itself as morally right. He urged southern legislatures to comply with the "equal" part of the separate-but-equal doctrine by bringing black facilities up to white standards and to eliminate the poll tax and other discriminatory practices that kept blacks from protecting themselves. He also decried southern "massive resistance" and lawlessness. In 1955 the Mississippi legislature censured Carter for an article he had published in Look attacking the White Citizens' Council, Carter's bete noire. Still, the civil rights movement rushed past Carter. His distrust of national civil rights organizations and his desire to have southerners settle racial matters themselves made Carter uncomfortable with the direct action of boycotts, freedom rides, and sitdown strikes that invited federal involvement. By the mid-1960's Carter was retiring into historical and popular writing. In 1962 he turned over effective control of the Delta Democrat-Times to his son Hodding Carter III and became writer-in-residence at Tulane University. He wrote often for the New York Times Magazine, finished the third of three military history books for the Landmark series for young readers, among other works, and continued to write editorials and essays on southern themes, including a growing number of warnings not to let industrial development destroy the South's land and heritage. The murder of Medgar Evers in 1963 and the violence of "Freedom Summer" 1964 shocked Carter, as did the subsequent "Black Power" movement. With moderation seemingly in retreat everywhere, Carter wrote So the Heffners Left McComb (1965), deploring the intimidation that drove a "moderate" family from a Mississippi town. Carter remained much in demand as a speaker and writer about the South, but failing eyesight and the death of his youngest son Thomas in 1964 drew him inward. In 1968 the assassination of Robert Kennedy, for whom Carter had particular affection, plunged Carter further into a deep depression from which he never fully recovered. He left Tulane in 1970 because of poor health. His final significant work (and nineteenth book), Their Words Were Bullets: The Southern Press in War, Reconstruction, and Peace (1969), allowed Carter to reflect on the importance of editorial moderation during times of crisis and to restate his lifelong credo of loving the South enough to criticize it. Carter died of a heart attack in Greenville.
Achievements
In 1946 Carter won the Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote editorials in the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times regarding social and economic intolerance in the Deep South that won him widespread acclaim and the moniker "Spokesman of the New South".
Late in life, Carter attended the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in 1965.
Politics
Carter was strongly opposed to the Munich Conference, which ceded Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler. Carter rushed into World War II service.
He wrote a caustic article for Look magazine which detailed the menacing spread of a chapter of the White Citizens' Council. The article was attacked on the floor of the Mississippi House of Representatives as a "Willful lie by a nigger-loving editor".
Carter was also an unabashed supporter of the Kennedys and their quest for the American Presidency.
Views
Quotations:
"An active minority can have its way against an apathetic majority. "
Personality
While stationed at Camp Blanding in Florida, he lost the sight in his right eye during a training exercise.
Connections
While in New Orleans, Carter met Betty Werlein, then a young college student, who shared his political and writing interests. They married on October 14, 1931, and collaborated as publishers and authors thereafter. The couple had three sons.
In addition to Hodding and Philip, they had a younger son, Thomas Hennen Carter (1945–1964), who killed himself playing a game of Russian roulette.
