Asa Earl Carter
Encyclopedia
Asa Earl Carter was an American political speechwriter and author. He was most notable for publishing novels and a best-selling, award-winning memoir under the name Forrest Carter, an identity as a Native American Cherokee
. In 1976, following the publication success of his western The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, The New York Times
revealed Forrest Carter to be Southerner Asa Earl Carter. His background became national news again in 1991 after his purported memoir, The Education of Little Tree, was re-issued in paperback and topped the Times paperback best-seller lists (both non-fiction and fiction). It also won the American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) award. (photo http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAasacarter.jpg)
Prior to his literary career as "Forrest", Carter was politically active for years in Alabama as an opponent to the civil rights movement: he worked as a speechwriter for segregationist Governor George Wallace
of Alabama
; founded the North Alabama Citizens Council
(NACC) and an independent Ku Klux Klan
group; and started the pro-segregation monthly titled The Southerner.
in 1925, the eldest of four children. Despite later claims (as author "Forrest" Carter) that he was orphaned, he was raised by his parents Ralph and Hermione Carter in nearby Oxford, Alabama
. Both parents lived into Carter's adulthood.
Carter served in the United States Navy
during World War II
and studied journalism
at the University of Colorado
. After the war, he married India Thelma Walker. The couple settled in Birmingham, Alabama
and had four children.
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 State's Rights Association, were syndicated to more than twenty radio stations before the show was cancelled. Carter was fired following community outrage about his broadcasts and a boycott of WILD. Carter broke with the leadership of the Alabama Citizen's Council movement over the incident. He refused to tone down his anti-Semitic rhetoric, while the Citizen's Council preferred to focus more narrowly on preserving racial segregation
of Blacks.
Carter started a renegade group called the North Alabama Citizen's Council. In addition to his careers in broadcasting and politics, Carter during these years ran a filling station. By March 1956, Carter was making national news as a spokesman for segregation. Carter was quoted in a UP
newswire story, saying 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 enrolling twelve black students. After Carter's 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 Kaspar, who was charged later that same month with sedition
and inciting a riot for his activities that day. Later that year, Carter ran for Police Commissioner against former office holder Bull Connor
, who won the election. Connor later became nationally famous for his heavy-handed approach to law enforcement during the civil rights
struggles in Birmingham.
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. Also during the mid-1950s, Carter founded a paramilitary
KKK splinter group called the "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.
Members of Carter's new KKK group attacked singer Nat King Cole
at an April 1956 Birmingham concert. After a more violent event, four members of Carter's Klan group were convicted of a September 1957 abduction and attack on a black handyman named 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).
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. In 1963, a parole board
, appointed by Carter's then-employer Alabama governor George Wallace, commuted the sentences of the four men convicted of attacking Aaron.
During the 1960s, Carter was a speechwriter
for Wallace. He was one of two men credited with Wallace's famous slogan
, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever", part of his 1963 inaugural speech
. Carter continued to work for Wallace. After his wife Lurleen
was elected Governor of Alabama in 1966, Carter worked for her. Wallace never acknowledged the role Carter played in his political career, however:
When Wallace decided to enter national politics with a 1968 presidential run, he did not invite Carter on board for the campaign. He sought to tone down his reputation as a segregationist firebrand. During the late 1960s, Carter grew disillusioned by what he saw as Wallace's liberal turn on race.
Carter ran against Wallace for governor of Alabama in 1970 on a white supremacist platform
. He finished last in a field of five candidates, winning only 1.51% of the vote in an election narrowly won by Wallace over the more moderate Governor Albert Brewer. At Wallace's 1971 inauguration, Carter and some of his supporters demonstrated against him, carrying signs reading "Wallace is a bigot" and "Free our white children". The demonstration was the last notable public appearance by "Asa Carter".
, where he started over. He began work on his first novel, spending days researching in Sweetwater's public library. He distanced himself from his past, began to call his sons "nephews", and renamed himself Forrest Carter, in honor of Confederate
Civil War
general Nathan Bedford Forrest
.
He and his wife later moved to St. George's Island, Florida
. There Carter completed a sequel to his first novel, as well as two books on Native American themes. Carter separated from his wife, who remained in Florida. In the late 1970s, he relocated to Abilene, Texas
.
Carter's best-known fictional works are The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (republished in 1975 under the title Gone to Texas) and The Education of Little Tree
(1976), originally published as a memoir. The latter sold modestly during Carter's life. It became a sleeper hit in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s.
Clint Eastwood
directed and starred in a 1976
film
adaptation of Josey Wales, retitled The Outlaw Josey Wales
. In 1997, after the success of the paperback edition of The Education of Little Tree, a film adaptation was produced. Originally intended as a made-for-TV movie
, it was given a theatrical release.
In 1978, Carter published Watch for Me on the Mountain, a fiction
alized biography
of Geronimo
. (It was reprinted in 1980 in an edition titled, Cry Geronimo!)
Carter was working on The Wanderings of Little Tree, a sequel to The Education of Little Tree, as well as a screenplay version of the book, when he died in Abilene on June 7, 1979. The cause of death was reported as heart failure, but alleged to have resulted from a fistfight with his son. Carter's body was returned to Alabama for burial near Anniston. No family members attended his funeral.
on the Today show in 1974. He was promoting The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, which had begun to attract readers beyond the confines of the Western genre. Carter, who had run for governor of Alabama (as Asa Carter) just four years earlier, was identified by several Alabama politicians, reporters and law enforcement officials from this Today show appearance. The Times also reported that the address Carter used in the copyright application for The Rebel Outlaw was identical to the one that he used in 1970 while running for governor. "Beyond denying that he is Asa Carter", the Times noted, "the author has declined to be interviewed on the subject."
Carter claimed that he was Little Tree and the events of the book were autobiographical
. In 1985 the book was purchased for a paperback edition and marketed by the University of New Mexico
Press as a memoir. It was subtitled "A True Story by Forrest Carter". The story described the relationship between the boy and his Scottish-Cherokee grandfather, a man named Wales (an overlap with Carter's other fiction). Written from the perspective of a boy orphaned at age five, the book described how he had become accustomed to life in a remote mountain hollow with his "Indian thinking" 'Granpa' and Cherokee 'Granma', who called him 'Little Tree'.
Granpa runs a small whiskey operation during Prohibition
and the later years of the Great Depression
. The grandparents and visitors to the hollow expose Little Tree to (supposed) Cherokee ways and "mountain people" values. The state removes him to an orphanage, where he stays for a few months until an old Indian friend intimidates the director into allowing Little Tree's release. (In life, Carter was neither orphaned, nor raised by Cherokee grandparents.)
Before taking a new name and identity, Carter had claimed to have distant maternal Cherokee
ancestry, a claim corroborated by some of his family members. Delacorte Press's original author biography referred to Carter as the Cherokee "Storyteller in Council." Members of the Cherokee nation have disputed his claim. They said so-called "Cherokee" words and customs in "The Education of Little Tree" are inaccurate, and the novel's characters are stereotyped. Several scholars and critics agreed with this assessment, adding that Carter's treatment of Native Americans
repeated the romantic but racist concept of the "Noble Savage
".
In 1985, the University of New Mexico
Press bought rights to The Education of Little Tree from original publisher Delacorte Press and published it in paperback. By its second year, the new paperback edition began to sell briskly through word-of-mouth publicity. Sales eventually surpassing 600,000. Though Carter's background as Asa Carter was discussed in academic circles, it was not widely known by the book-buying public nearly ten years after the 1976 New York Times article about him. In 1991, after the book won the American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) award, it ranked number one on The New York Times non-fiction paperback best-seller list for several weeks.
On October 4, 1991, Dan T. Carter
(a history professor and distant cousin of Asa Carter) published the article "The Transformation of a Klansman" in the New York Times. This article shed light on Asa Carter's dual identity. The Times shifted the book onto its fiction list. Scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
also wrote an article on Carter and Little Tree for The Times that appeared in November 1991.
In 1997, a film adaptation of Little Tree was released, which revived publicity about Asa Carter. Carter's widow, India Carter, refused most interview requests during these years. In 1991 she did confirm to Publisher's Weekly that Forrest and Asa were the same person. Eleanor Friede, Little Trees original editor, defended Carter's background in 1997, telling the Times, "[H]e was not a member of the Ku Klux Klan. I honestly don't see the point of all this nasty gossip dragged out years ago."
Following the 1991 publicity, the University of New Mexico Press changed the cover of Little Tree, removing the "True Story" subtitle and adding a fiction classification label. The biographical material in the introduction has never been changed to include details of Carter's involvement with segregationist politics and the KKK. Little Tree has continued to find readers and a place on reading lists for young adults since 1991. For fans who know of the controversy, many take the position of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
, who argued that Little Tree can be appreciated for its message of tolerance and its other qualities, despite the biography of its creator.
Richard Friedenberg wrote and directed the 1997 film adaptation. He also has defended the book, but not the author:
Oprah Winfrey
, who in 1994 endorsed Little Tree, subsequently removed it from her list of recommended book titles:
Cherokee
The Cherokee are a Native American people historically settled in the Southeastern United States . Linguistically, they are part of the Iroquoian language family...
. In 1976, following the publication success of his western The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
revealed Forrest Carter to be Southerner Asa Earl Carter. His background became national news again in 1991 after his purported memoir, The Education of Little Tree, was re-issued in paperback and topped the Times paperback best-seller lists (both non-fiction and fiction). It also won the American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) award. (photo http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAasacarter.jpg)
Prior to his literary career as "Forrest", Carter was politically active for years in Alabama as an opponent to the civil rights movement: he worked as a speechwriter for segregationist Governor George Wallace
George Wallace
George Corley Wallace, Jr. was the 45th Governor of Alabama, serving four terms: 1963–1967, 1971–1979 and 1983–1987. "The most influential loser" in 20th-century U.S. politics, according to biographers Dan T. Carter and Stephan Lesher, he ran for U.S...
of Alabama
Alabama
Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...
; founded the North Alabama Citizens Council
White Citizens' Council
The White Citizens' Council was an American white supremacist organization formed on July 11, 1954. After 1956, it was known as the Citizens' Councils of America...
(NACC) and an independent Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...
group; and started the pro-segregation monthly titled The Southerner.
Early life
Asa Carter was born in Anniston, AlabamaAnniston, Alabama
Anniston is a city in Calhoun County in the state of Alabama, United States.As of the 2000 census, the population of the city is 24,276. According to the 2005 U.S. Census estimates, the city had a population of 23,741...
in 1925, the eldest of four children. Despite later claims (as author "Forrest" Carter) that he was orphaned, he was raised by his parents Ralph and Hermione Carter in nearby Oxford, Alabama
Oxford, Alabama
Oxford is a city in Calhoun and Talladega counties in the U.S. state of Alabama. The population was 14,592 at the 2000 census. Oxford is one of two principal cities of and included in the Anniston-Oxford Metropolitan Statistical Area...
. Both parents lived into Carter's adulthood.
Carter served in the United States Navy
United States Navy
The United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...
during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
and studied journalism
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...
at the University of Colorado
University of Colorado at Boulder
The University of Colorado Boulder is a public research university located in Boulder, Colorado...
. After the war, he married India Thelma Walker. The couple settled in Birmingham, Alabama
Birmingham, Alabama
Birmingham is the largest city in Alabama. The city is the county seat of Jefferson County. According to the 2010 United States Census, Birmingham had a population of 212,237. The Birmingham-Hoover Metropolitan Area, in estimate by the U.S...
and had four children.
Career
Carter worked for several area radioRadio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
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 State's Rights Association, were syndicated to more than twenty radio stations before the show was cancelled. Carter was fired following community outrage about his broadcasts and a boycott of WILD. Carter broke with the leadership of the Alabama Citizen's Council movement over the incident. He refused to tone down his anti-Semitic rhetoric, while the Citizen's Council preferred to focus more narrowly on preserving racial segregation
Racial segregation
Racial segregation is the separation of humans into racial groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home...
of Blacks.
Carter started a renegade group called the North Alabama Citizen's Council. In addition to his careers in broadcasting and politics, Carter during these years ran a filling station. By March 1956, Carter was making national news as a spokesman for segregation. Carter was quoted in a UP
United Press International
United Press International is a once-major international news agency, whose newswires, photo, news film and audio services provided news material to thousands of newspapers, magazines and radio and television stations for most of the twentieth century...
newswire story, saying 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
Racial integration
Racial integration, or simply integration includes desegregation . In addition to desegregation, integration includes goals such as leveling barriers to association, creating equal opportunity regardless of race, and the development of a culture that draws on diverse traditions, rather than merely...
speech in Clinton, Tennessee
Clinton, Tennessee
Clinton is a city in Anderson County, Tennessee, United States. Its population was 9,409 at the United States Census, 2000. It is the county seat of Anderson County. Clinton is included in the "Knoxville, Tennessee Metropolitan Statistical Area".-Geography:...
. He addressed Clinton's high school enrolling twelve black students. After Carter's 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 Kaspar, who was charged later that same month with sedition
Sedition
In law, sedition is overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that is deemed by the legal authority to tend toward insurrection against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent to lawful authority. Sedition may include any...
and inciting a riot for his activities that day. Later that year, Carter ran for Police Commissioner against former office holder Bull Connor
Bull Connor
Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor was the Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Birmingham, Alabama, during the American Civil Rights Movement...
, who won the election. Connor later became nationally famous for his heavy-handed approach to law enforcement during the civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
struggles in Birmingham.
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
Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...
(KKK) shooting. Also during the mid-1950s, Carter founded a paramilitary
Paramilitary
A paramilitary is a force whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military, but which is not considered part of a state's formal armed forces....
KKK splinter group called the "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.
Members of Carter's new KKK group attacked singer Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole
Nathaniel Adams Coles , known professionally as Nat King Cole, was an American musician who first came to prominence as a leading jazz pianist. Although an accomplished pianist, he owes most of his popular musical fame to his soft baritone voice, which he used to perform in big band and jazz genres...
at an April 1956 Birmingham concert. After a more violent event, four members of Carter's Klan group were convicted of a September 1957 abduction and attack on a black handyman named Edward Aaron. They castrated Aaron, poured turpentine
Turpentine
Turpentine is a fluid obtained by the distillation of resin obtained from trees, mainly pine trees. It is composed of terpenes, mainly the monoterpenes alpha-pinene and beta-pinene...
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).
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. In 1963, a parole board
Parole Board
A parole board is a panel of people who decide whether an offender should be released from prison on parole after serving at least a minimum portion of their sentence as prescribed by the sentencing judge. Parole boards are used in many jurisdictions, including the United Kingdom and the United...
, appointed by Carter's then-employer Alabama governor George Wallace, commuted the sentences of the four men convicted of attacking Aaron.
During the 1960s, Carter was a speechwriter
Speechwriter
A speechwriter is a person who is hired to prepare and write speeches that will be delivered by another person. Speechwriters are used by many senior-level elected officials and executives in the government and private sectors.-Skills and training:...
for Wallace. He was one of two men credited with Wallace's famous slogan
Slogan
A slogan is a memorable motto or phrase used in a political, commercial, religious and other context as a repetitive expression of an idea or purpose. The word slogan is derived from slogorn which was an Anglicisation of the Scottish Gaelic sluagh-ghairm . Slogans vary from the written and the...
, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever", part of his 1963 inaugural speech
George Wallace's 1963 Inaugural Address
George Wallace's 1963 Inaugural Address was delivered January 14, 1963, following his election as Governor of Alabama. Wallace at this time in his career was an ardent segregationist, and as Governor he challenged the attempts of the federal government to enforce laws prohibiting segregation in...
. Carter continued to work for Wallace. After his wife Lurleen
Lurleen Wallace
Lurleen Brigham Wallace , born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was the 46th Governor of Alabama from 1967 until her death in 1968. She was the first wife of Alabama Governor George Wallace, whom she succeeded as governor. She succeeded her husband as he was forbidden by Alabama law to succeed himself. She...
was elected Governor of Alabama in 1966, Carter worked for her. Wallace never acknowledged the role Carter played in his political career, however:
"Till the day he died, George Wallace denied that he ever knew Asa Carter. He may have been telling the truth. 'Ace', as he was called by the staff, was paid off indirectly by Wallace cronies, and the only record that he ever wrote for Wallace was the word of former Wallace campaign officials such as finance manager Seymore Trammell."
When Wallace decided to enter national politics with a 1968 presidential run, he did not invite Carter on board for the campaign. He sought to tone down his reputation as a segregationist firebrand. During the late 1960s, Carter grew disillusioned by what he saw as Wallace's liberal turn on race.
Carter ran against Wallace for governor of Alabama in 1970 on a white supremacist platform
Party platform
A party platform, or platform sometimes also referred to as a manifesto, is a list of the actions which a political party, individual candidate, or other organization supports in order to appeal to the general public for the purpose of having said peoples' candidates voted into political office or...
. He finished last in a field of five candidates, winning only 1.51% of the vote in an election narrowly won by Wallace over the more moderate Governor Albert Brewer. At Wallace's 1971 inauguration, Carter and some of his supporters demonstrated against him, carrying signs reading "Wallace is a bigot" and "Free our white children". The demonstration was the last notable public appearance by "Asa Carter".
Literary career and death
After losing the election, Carter relocated to Sweetwater, TexasSweetwater, Texas
Sweetwater is the county seat of Nolan County, Texas, United States. The population was 11,415 at the 2000 census.-History:Sweetwater received a U.S. post office in 1879. The Texas and Pacific Railway started service in 1881, with the first train arriving on March 12 of that year, beginning...
, where he started over. He began work on his first novel, spending days researching in Sweetwater's public library. He distanced himself from his past, began to call his sons "nephews", and renamed himself Forrest Carter, in honor of Confederate
Confederate States Army
The Confederate States Army was the army of the Confederate States of America while the Confederacy existed during the American Civil War. On February 8, 1861, delegates from the seven Deep South states which had already declared their secession from the United States of America adopted the...
Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
general Nathan Bedford Forrest
Nathan Bedford Forrest
Nathan Bedford Forrest was a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. He is remembered both as a self-educated, innovative cavalry leader during the war and as a leading southern advocate in the postwar years...
.
He and his wife later moved to St. George's Island, Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
. There Carter completed a sequel to his first novel, as well as two books on Native American themes. Carter separated from his wife, who remained in Florida. In the late 1970s, he relocated to Abilene, Texas
Abilene, Texas
Abilene is a city in Taylor and Jones counties in west central Texas. The population was 117,063 at the 2010 census. It is the principal city of the Abilene Metropolitan Statistical Area, which had a 2006 estimated population of 158,063. It is the county seat of Taylor County...
.
Carter's best-known fictional works are The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (republished in 1975 under the title Gone to Texas) and The Education of Little Tree
The Education of Little Tree
The Education of Little Tree is a memoir-style novel written by Asa Earl Carter under the pseudonym Forrest Carter. Since its first publication by Delacorte Press in 1976, the book has been the subject of acclaim. Many people have been drawn to its message of simple living, tradition, and love of...
(1976), originally published as a memoir. The latter sold modestly during Carter's life. It became a sleeper hit in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s.
Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood
Clinton "Clint" Eastwood, Jr. is an American film actor, director, producer, composer and politician. Eastwood first came to prominence as a supporting cast member in the TV series Rawhide...
directed and starred in a 1976
1976 in film
The year 1976 in film involved some significant events.-Events:*March 22 - Filming begins on George Lucas' Star Wars science fiction film...
film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
adaptation of Josey Wales, retitled The Outlaw Josey Wales
The Outlaw Josey Wales
The Outlaw Josey Wales is a 1976 American revisionist Western film set during and after the end of the American Civil War. It was directed by and starred Clint Eastwood , with Chief Dan George, Sondra Locke, Sam Bottoms, and Geraldine Keams.The film was adapted by Sonia Chernus and Philip Kaufman...
. In 1997, after the success of the paperback edition of The Education of Little Tree, a film adaptation was produced. Originally intended as a made-for-TV movie
Television movie
A television film is a feature film that is a television program produced for and originally distributed by a television network, in contrast to...
, it was given a theatrical release.
In 1978, Carter published Watch for Me on the Mountain, a fiction
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
alized biography
Biography
A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...
of Geronimo
Geronimo
Geronimo was a prominent Native American leader of the Chiricahua Apache who fought against Mexico and the United States for their expansion into Apache tribal lands for several decades during the Apache Wars. Allegedly, "Geronimo" was the name given to him during a Mexican incident...
. (It was reprinted in 1980 in an edition titled, Cry Geronimo!)
Carter was working on The Wanderings of Little Tree, a sequel to The Education of Little Tree, as well as a screenplay version of the book, when he died in Abilene on June 7, 1979. The cause of death was reported as heart failure, but alleged to have resulted from a fistfight with his son. Carter's body was returned to Alabama for burial near Anniston. No family members attended his funeral.
Controversy and criticism
Carter spent the last part of his life trying to conceal his background as a Klansman and segregationist, claiming categorically in a 1976 The New York Times article that he, Forrest, was not Asa Carter. The article describes him as Forrest Carter being interviewed by Barbara WaltersBarbara Walters
Barbara Jill Walters is an American broadcast journalist, author, and television personality. She has hosted morning television shows , the television newsmagazine , former co-anchor of the ABC Evening News, and current contributor to ABC News.Walters was first known as a popular TV morning news...
on the Today show in 1974. He was promoting The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, which had begun to attract readers beyond the confines of the Western genre. Carter, who had run for governor of Alabama (as Asa Carter) just four years earlier, was identified by several Alabama politicians, reporters and law enforcement officials from this Today show appearance. The Times also reported that the address Carter used in the copyright application for The Rebel Outlaw was identical to the one that he used in 1970 while running for governor. "Beyond denying that he is Asa Carter", the Times noted, "the author has declined to be interviewed on the subject."
Carter claimed that he was Little Tree and the events of the book were autobiographical
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...
. In 1985 the book was purchased for a paperback edition and marketed by the University of New Mexico
University of New Mexico
The University of New Mexico at Albuquerque is a public research university located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the United States. It is the state's flagship research institution...
Press as a memoir. It was subtitled "A True Story by Forrest Carter". The story described the relationship between the boy and his Scottish-Cherokee grandfather, a man named Wales (an overlap with Carter's other fiction). Written from the perspective of a boy orphaned at age five, the book described how he had become accustomed to life in a remote mountain hollow with his "Indian thinking" 'Granpa' and Cherokee 'Granma', who called him 'Little Tree'.
Granpa runs a small whiskey operation during Prohibition
Prohibition
Prohibition of alcohol, often referred to simply as prohibition, is the practice of prohibiting the manufacture, transportation, import, export, sale, and consumption of alcohol and alcoholic beverages. The term can also apply to the periods in the histories of the countries during which the...
and the later years of the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
. The grandparents and visitors to the hollow expose Little Tree to (supposed) Cherokee ways and "mountain people" values. The state removes him to an orphanage, where he stays for a few months until an old Indian friend intimidates the director into allowing Little Tree's release. (In life, Carter was neither orphaned, nor raised by Cherokee grandparents.)
Before taking a new name and identity, Carter had claimed to have distant maternal Cherokee
Cherokee
The Cherokee are a Native American people historically settled in the Southeastern United States . Linguistically, they are part of the Iroquoian language family...
ancestry, a claim corroborated by some of his family members. Delacorte Press's original author biography referred to Carter as the Cherokee "Storyteller in Council." Members of the Cherokee nation have disputed his claim. They said so-called "Cherokee" words and customs in "The Education of Little Tree" are inaccurate, and the novel's characters are stereotyped. Several scholars and critics agreed with this assessment, adding that Carter's treatment of Native Americans
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
repeated the romantic but racist concept of the "Noble Savage
Noble savage
The term noble savage , expresses the concept an idealized indigene, outsider , and refers to the literary stock character of the same...
".
In 1985, the University of New Mexico
University of New Mexico
The University of New Mexico at Albuquerque is a public research university located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the United States. It is the state's flagship research institution...
Press bought rights to The Education of Little Tree from original publisher Delacorte Press and published it in paperback. By its second year, the new paperback edition began to sell briskly through word-of-mouth publicity. Sales eventually surpassing 600,000. Though Carter's background as Asa Carter was discussed in academic circles, it was not widely known by the book-buying public nearly ten years after the 1976 New York Times article about him. In 1991, after the book won the American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) award, it ranked number one on The New York Times non-fiction paperback best-seller list for several weeks.
On October 4, 1991, Dan T. Carter
Dan T. Carter
-Life:He graduated from University of South Carolina, University of Wisconsin, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a Ph.D. in 1967.He taught at the University of Maryland, and the University of Wisconsin....
(a history professor and distant cousin of Asa Carter) published the article "The Transformation of a Klansman" in the New York Times. This article shed light on Asa Carter's dual identity. The Times shifted the book onto its fiction list. Scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual. He was the first African American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. He has received numerous honorary degrees and awards for his teaching, research, and...
also wrote an article on Carter and Little Tree for The Times that appeared in November 1991.
In 1997, a film adaptation of Little Tree was released, which revived publicity about Asa Carter. Carter's widow, India Carter, refused most interview requests during these years. In 1991 she did confirm to Publisher's Weekly that Forrest and Asa were the same person. Eleanor Friede, Little Trees original editor, defended Carter's background in 1997, telling the Times, "[H]e was not a member of the Ku Klux Klan. I honestly don't see the point of all this nasty gossip dragged out years ago."
Following the 1991 publicity, the University of New Mexico Press changed the cover of Little Tree, removing the "True Story" subtitle and adding a fiction classification label. The biographical material in the introduction has never been changed to include details of Carter's involvement with segregationist politics and the KKK. Little Tree has continued to find readers and a place on reading lists for young adults since 1991. For fans who know of the controversy, many take the position of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual. He was the first African American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. He has received numerous honorary degrees and awards for his teaching, research, and...
, who argued that Little Tree can be appreciated for its message of tolerance and its other qualities, despite the biography of its creator.
Richard Friedenberg wrote and directed the 1997 film adaptation. He also has defended the book, but not the author:
Mr. Friedenberg said what appealed to him about the book was that "the characters and milieu they were in represented everything that was good about America and everything that was bad." On the one hand, he said, the book dealt with the strength of the family and not necessarily with traditional families. On the other hand, he said, it dealt with ignorance and prejudice. Mr. Friedenberg said he found it perplexing and almost impossible to understand Mr. Carter's motives and literary ambitions. Although Mr. Carter, who wrote four books, failed to address the issue of his bigotry publicly, Mr. Friedenberg said he believed that "his apology was in his literature." For example, he said, the handful of blacks and Jews in his books are depicted sympathetically. "The bad guys are almost, without fail, rich whites, politicians and phony preachers," Mr. Friedenberg said.
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her self-titled, multi-award-winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011...
, who in 1994 endorsed Little Tree, subsequently removed it from her list of recommended book titles:
"I no longer—even though I had been moved by the story—felt the same about this book," Winfrey said in 1994. "There's a part of me that said, 'Well, OK, if a person has two sides of them and can write this wonderful story and also write the segregation forever speech, maybe that's OK.' But I couldn't—I couldn't live with that."
The book has also been criticized on literary grounds: "I am surprised, of course, that Winfrey would recommend it," says Lorene Roy, president of the American Library AssociationAmerican Library AssociationThe American Library Association is a non-profit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with more than 62,000 members....
. "Besides the questions about the author's identity, the book is known for a simplistic plot that used a lot of stereotypical imagery."
External links
- "Asa Carter", PBS's People and Events
- David Treuer, "Going native: Why do writers pretend to be Indians?", Slate.com