African American Public Relations Corporation

Exalting a positive image of African Americans

Monday, September 21, 2009

September 21, 2009

W. Horace Carter, 88, a Publisher Whose Paper Challenged the Klan, Dies

By BRUCE WEBER

W. Horace Carter, the editor and publisher of a small-town North Carolina newspaper whose stubborn, angry opposition to local activities of the Ku Klux Klan helped quell the expansion of the Klan in the Carolinas and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953, died Wednesday while being transported from a hospital in Wilmington, N.C., to his home in nearby Tabor City. He was 88.
The cause was a heart attack, the second one Mr. Carter had suffered within 10 days, his son, Russell, said.

On July 22, 1950, a Saturday, the Ku Klux Klan staged a parade, cars full of armed and hooded men, through Tabor City, on the border between North and South Carolina. Though without violence, the event was ominous, heralding a Klan recruiting drive in the area. Mr. Carter, the editor of The Tabor City Tribune, a weekly paper he had founded four years earlier, responded immediately. For the next issue, dated July 26, he composed a stern column of opinion under the headline: “An Editorial: No Excuse for KKK.”

“The Klan, despite its Americanism plea, is the personification of Fascism and Nazism,” he wrote. “It is just such outside-the-law operations that lead to dictatorships through fear and insecurity.”

Thus began Mr. Carter’s campaign against the Klan, a fiercely antagonistic opposition to the organization’s policies and methods and its very presence in Columbus County, N.C., and Horry County, S.C. Over three years, his paper ran more than 100 Klan-related stories and editorials that he wrote. They reported and commented on rallies, shootings, beatings and a series of floggings that eventually brought the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the region and ended with federal and state prosecutions of more than 100 Klansmen, including Thomas Hamilton, who was known as the Grand Dragon of the Association of Carolina Klans.

Mr. Carter stood up to numerous personal threats against himself and his family. He was twice visited in his office by Hamilton, who promised retribution against The Tabor City Tribune and its advertisers. And though he more than once published letters defending the Klan in his paper, he found himself somewhat isolated by his community, where many people shared the Klan’s pro-Christian, anti-Communist outlook and were roused as well by its white-supremacist exhortations.

“He was a God-and-country kind of guy,” Russell Carter said about his father. “But he was committed to social justice, and he was not prepared for the fact that other people didn’t see it that way. He had very meager support, especially early on.”

The Tabor City Tribune was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service, which it shared with another local paper nearby, The Whiteville News Reporter, whose editor, Willard Cole, was a Carter ally. The citation read: “For their successful campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, waged on their own doorstep at the risk of economic loss and personal danger, culminating in the conviction of over one hundred Klansmen and an end to terrorism in their communities.”

Walter Horace Carter was born in Albemarle, N.C., near Charlotte, on Jan. 20, 1921. He was the first in his family to graduate from high school, and he attended the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he was editor of the student newspaper, The Tar Heel. He served in the Navy, in both the North Atlantic and the Pacific, during World War II. When he returned, he took a job as executive secretary of the Tabor City merchants association, and on the strength of that affiliation, he founded The Tribune. It is now called The Tabor-Loris Tribune, also covering Loris, S.C.

Mr. Carter’s first wife, Lucile, died in 1982. A second marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his son, who lives in Wilmington and now owns The Tribune, he is survived by his third wife, Linda Duncan Carter, whom he married in 1995; a brother, Mitchell, of Albemarle, N.C.; two daughters, Linda Carter Metzger of Lumberton, N.C., and Velda Carter Hughes of Greenville, S.C., 10 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Mr. Carter left newspapering in the 1970s, moving to Cross Creek, Fla., where he fished and wrote books and articles about the outdoors. But in the early 1990s, he returned to Tabor City and went back to The Tribune, continuing to write and edit the paper until just before his death. He often talked about the Klan battle, his son said, how the family had to move from place to place to stay safe, and how his wife, Lucile, supported him.

“He acknowledged being scared, especially for his family,” Russell Carter said. “But he was a newspaperman.”