American Experience; 1964; Interview with Hodding Carter III, Newspaper Editor, part 4 of 6

And in the end, it's kind of ironic, but it was the thing that ultimately brought the South back into the country. It did it in several ways. Well, bringing the South back in the country was the inevitable result of a succession of civil rights acts, the voting right back the next year I have to say was stunningly necessary. But by that time, I won't think anybody thought it wasn't going to pass. Well, I'm probably wrong there, but in any case, it seemed inevitable. But bringing us back into the country in a way, let's the country off the hook as well, I'll say again, we had been idiosyncratic since reconstruction because we were left alone. When we come back into the country, we come back in very much under common rules, but not to common purpose.

I mean, much of the white South to this day does not accept the underlying proposition of the acts. We used to have a one-party system because of reconstruction. We now have a one-party system, at least in part because of the second reconstruction and the sense that there's only one home for the white men, and the old days, it was a one-party democratic system, and now it's a one-party Republican system. And here is not good news for those who think history is an arc toward whatever the arc of history. Yeah, yeah, right. At this point, the arc of history in the South at the local and state levels bends in quite a different direction into forms of reaction, economic and other, which would not be unfamiliar to my old state, you know, 40 years ago. Let me jump ahead because I don't want to exhaust us with too much, I want to keep moving, we can always circle back.

As I say, I feel a buster. Go ahead. While all these speeches are being made in Washington, what's happening in Mississippi? Well, a lot of stunning things, actually. The preceding year in 63, the Freedom Democrats had been formed and ran in alternative candidate for governor since, of course, blacks couldn't really vote Mississippi beyond a few thousand. Alternative candidate for governor and lieutenant governor, which caught the eye of many folks in the country, by 64, you had seen brought together, and again, because of the events in Mississippi and elsewhere, made it seem like a cause worth fighting for a lot of young people. We brought together, in truth, the Freedom Summer, which was an attempt by largely idealistic college kids and somewhat older, to come into Mississippi to try to help them integrate

the voting booth, to try to help them work on housing them, meaning black folks, and to live among them and to be in effect the new freedman's bureau of bringing in the possibility of real change and saying the rest of the country is with you. That stirred the beast. The clan had been pretty much crushed in the 20s because the upper class, the Bourbons and others found it to be an irritant and have no great use in besides which they weren't their class. At the time, the old clan. By the time of the 64, there was various white organizations around which were dedicated to the proposition that we are going to keep segregation without violence. They were losing.

Starting with the great cascade of massive promises of radical change from these youngsters coming in, the clan reforms in a huge way, not to the clan ever die, but it had not really been functioning very much. Comes the summer and all of a sudden, these freedom schools and houses are popping up all over Mississippi and with them come burnings and explosions and what have you. The biggest thing, of course, that happened was visibly three kids got lynch murdered over in the Shobak County, Mississippi, one of the, and it was inescapably horrible because it was so blatant, they're there and then they're not there and they're vanished. Lyndon ain't going to take that and God knows that Jay Eger Hoover didn't give a damn about any of this. He hated to involve his people in messy things that left wingers wanted, but Lyndon in the effects had get the FBI in there and find these things and get it done.

Because it's a big problem. It's a huge problem. It is, it's intolerable while he's promising this whole new thing coming, the Civil Rights Act has not yet passed, but it soon will find that summer and so he does send them in. I was sitting in a room when Alan Dulles was sent down on a fact-finding mission to talk to the establishment of Mississippi, the governor and big business types and everything. We're sitting there and Alan says, well, what do you think's happened? And one of them says, they're in Cuba and Dulles puffs on his pipe and he says, really, said, of course, this is all meant to humiliate Mississippi. There's nothing wrong with those boys. They're just playing a left-wing game. They've gone to Cuba. And Dulles who was imperturbable clearly almost went and swallowed his pipe, you know, listening to this crap. In any case, that event was a major deal, which would devil the Republican invention in San Francisco later.

Where are they? They were saying marching around the Mississippi delegation, which was pure goldwater at San Francisco, the Republican convention. But Mississippi was to head and was to reconfirm its first Republican congressman, not on the basis of him being some old Republican, but him being a guy who could say, if you want to preserve our way of life, abandon the party of your fathers, which is already abandoned us, and let's all get aboard a party that will reflect us, a turning up of history which was amazing, and yet utterly correct. That is, there was not going to be a hospitable place for the old south, increasingly in the democratic party in process. Can we get back to Schorner, Goodyhead, and Cheney? In a way, the reaction to their disappearance confirms everything that Bob Moses and others

were thinking about why white kids needed to come because of some of them. Certainly. It was. What was so surprising about, I mean, black bodies are turning up every month. Look, I keep saying this just to infuriate everybody, but essentially white America doesn't give a damn, and didn't give a damn about black America, in the same fundamental way that a thousand people can die in a very accident off of blah, and we get nothing out of it, and two people die in an all-wheel accident, and it's an eight-paragraph story, I mean, if it's here in America. Well, the same thing was true, but the difference between what happens to white folks and black folks. Second, the type of kids who went down there were two, one, classically, middle, upper middle, class, educated folks of tremendous idealism, and two, red diaper babies of one kind or another who already were passionately committed out of their own backgrounds, and we're going to go down there to, in effect, use this as another test case to change the

nature of the society. By that time, we were free-speeching all over the place here, and we were SDS-ing there, and things were underway, which were changing much of the nature of how young America was behaving. Or at least that fraction of young America that always is the substitute for reality. And it was the exact, to the precise embodiment of their thesis, that it would only be whites getting beat up, it would only be whites being killed, which would so capture the political attention of the country as to hasten the day of change. How did it affect you, person? It was the end of the game for me. I had been very careful for a long time. I wanted to stay in business. The white people in Mississippi didn't think I was careful, but according to how I was,

I was careful. I mean, I wrote it at Toros about putting Ross Barnett in the federal prison and all that stuff when he tried to confront the federal government over Ole Miss, but that's of those boys. It was it. I said the hell with this. I can't just write it at Toros. I can't just sit here and be an observer while this kind of thing is happening in my state at a time in which change is supposed to be coming and every lever of power in the state is being used to stop it, including violence, as though we were back in the period of reconstruction. And they forced back the federal government by insurrection, and I said, that's what's going on. And it was. It was an attempt to force back the feds in the same way they had in the post-65 to 76 period, 18, 65, 76. So I said, that's it. And I got involved. I mean, slowly, slowly, I mean, first I covered the Republican Convention and the Democratic Convention, the Republican Convention, finished my determination that if this represented

at a major American party, then we were in deep trouble. And that- Let's go there, just to say. I'm wondering if there's anything else we want to talk about through some of these. That's great. Well, it was an old hymn. Once every man in nation comes a moment to decide. And I was there. If that couldn't make you decide, then you weren't going to decide except to stay with the old flow. And for a lot of us, I'm sure, but certainly for me, that was it. At that point, throw off the mask, throw off the restraint, and, you know, that again, if you read what I wrote in those days, some of it sounds like something written by some the effort about some asked, I can't remember what, but I'm sure I did. At 64, I was editor, about 64. What? No, no, no, no, no, no, I did. By 1964, I was editor of the family newspaper, The Delta Democrat Times of Greenville, Mississippi.

My father had founded it in 1936. They'd want to pull it surfer racial tolerance editorials, and 45 had been an object single, most important object of white hatred among whites in Mississippi thereafter. And that's where I'd grown up. And I was given the great gift of running that newspaper when I was too ignorant and arrogant to know I didn't have the ability to do it well, but it was a great, great war, the last good war of this country. And it was terrific to be offered, to have that opportunity. Thank you, dad, as we say. But it was a great job. Did you ever have, like, virus visiting on your family? I can't tell you the number of threats there were, but there were two things people knew about the hiding carters, because it was true. One was, oh gosh, horrors for those of you, gun haters. One was, they knew we carried guns.

Second, they knew we had guns in the house. And third, they knew that it was not much hesitation about it. There was no restraint. There were any number of threats I might growing up is full of memories of dad slamming down the phone saying, you know some bitch, well, come and get me. And then he'd go out and he'd sit there next to the car with a 45, his old service 45 and a buckshot shotgun and wait for him to come and they never came. And on the Idaho Miss, we lost 10,000, I mean, we lost 10% of our circulation right at that moment when the troops went in and they came and they came at us, but we were standing out rather ostentatiously outside of the house and what have you. So they burned the cross the next night when we were all exhausted. But no, we never, ever were directly assaulted. And why it was, I didn't have my ass beat to the ground, I do not know because I went

around all the time and I was scared to death. It didn't happen. Great story. You go and cover the Cow Palace. What was it like? I went to cover the Cow Palace as a person covering my state's delegation. I mean, we were a very poor newspaper. We didn't send people out there to do the job of the National Press. So I went with the Mississippi delegation and the Mississippi delegation was basically a very hard right wing delegation and segregationist. It was essentially led by my very good friend, a man named Clark Reed, who from there till now is a Godfather of the Republican Party in the South and a figure of some significance and out there was very much a goldwaterite as a whole delegation was. And so it was terrific, I mean, I got a chance to be right at the center of the takeover

and to be able to write stories that the rest of the National Press left me about, like I said, on Sunday. The Vice Presidential nominee is going to be William Miller, and I'll never forget Dick Harbwood at the Washington Post saying, you are so full of crap, is that they're never going to nominate Miller? That's a year they are, you know, because those guys were right at the center of the Republican rights takeover. What was, what was so striking about this convention compared to the previous ones? 73% of our goldwaterites have never even been to that. Well, that's the thing. It was an effect of Tea Party in its first phase. I mean, that is, these are folks, true believers who understand that the Republican Party has sold out principle in the past, and that they are ready by God for a real Republican party, and they want a real American Republican party. And they are... Of course, but I'm putting that in quotation marks.

I mean, of course, conservative, they were Tea Party acts, I mean, and they did a beautiful job. If I were a Tea Party act, I'd look to that example, and would say, you know, we did it before we can do it again, and they are. They were coseted, even by some of the establishment Republicans, because they seemed to offer the hope of a national majority, which didn't have to overcome the fact of a solid South voting the other way for Democrats. I'll never forget standing at a telephone, and one of those freestanding telephones and a lobby like this, and I'm calling in something to the paper, and I suddenly hear this yapping voice. That's right. George Bush. I'm with him 100 percent. Yes. On the Civil Rights Bill, he's absolutely right. He is got it right. Go on or right. George Bush, right. I never had any faith in the integrity of George Bush from that moment till now, and I'm

not talking about the Sun, just yapping along this portrayer of his own family's heritage. His father having been a participant in Civil Rights legislation, as one of those establishment Republicans, now he's down there in Texas yapping like an idiot, lackey of the oil people and the racists. It was disgusting. Anyway, it was a rare moment that I would be so close to the delegation and get a chance to really listen to them. They let me into everything except the... And of course, a lot of them. They didn't trust me, worth a damn, except that I was a good friend of Clarks, and I was actually a friend of some of them. This is also a matter just to get right down to it of class. So a lot of them, we knew each other because there was a small group of whites to begin with in the state, and then there's a smaller group of whites who went to college in a small... I mean, you know, it's that same class thing.

And... So what was the overall... Allra? Yeah. Oh my God. Oh my God. I was easily made hysterical by false illusions, and so I was confident that I saw jackboots and I could see books burning and the mob screaming, I was like, I mean, you know, as they shouted down or tried to shout down, Nelson Rockefeller, they went crazy when... What was it that Eisenhower said, something about columnists and commentators? I can't remember anymore. But... We want barracks. Well, of course, we want barracks, was on stop, and also some variation on the Latin, the Mexican chant. Oh my God. Yeah. And then when he gave it speech, you know, I'm listening, and I suddenly realized what the words may mean, one thing to me, that you mean something really different deliberately about the whole question about whether or not you could be moderate and defensive liberty

and it was a rare moment in which there was a true... Now I'm thinking I'm being naive, I now know there's hardly anything truly spontaneous at conventions, but I think at that convention, when that phrase was uttered, while the cheerleaders may have started it, it was deafening the reaction to that, that was it. They were people on a mission which was in the best American tradition, to be emphatic about the redemption of our values and to be immoderate in advancing their position. It was amazing. It was amazing. Wow. Great. That whole Rockefeller moment, what's Rockefeller trying to do? He's baiting them. Well, of course, he's baiting them. We forget, of course, now, that there were liberal Republicans, so mainstream Republicans who...

You know, what I have a really good friend who was working for him then, and I've never actually pursued this one into what may be reality as opposed to various analyses, so I can't answer for that, except that he is, after all, the paladin of what's left of the establishment. Somebody has to get out there and say, no, this is not a Republican party, that we are people of a different background. We are the party, the grand old party, which has real meaning. And that, not everybody is going to be here. I cannot believe by that time he didn't have total counters. I mean, on the other hand, it's been so long since it was actually an unstructured convention that you forget that there were times when things could turn conventions. But... Oh, he had it locked. That white had it locked in. Cliff White was, of course, a master, and that was, you know, it's a horrible thing to

be at this business so long that you admire some of these stunning technicians because they're so good at what they do. I'm going to get to Atlantic City, but before we do, a couple things happen in the summer between the conventions. One thing is Harlem, it's full of, God, I forgot that. Yeah. It's not by the standards of Watson, other things that come later, it's a little intro, but it's shocking. I'll tell you a story. There had been two of options there, one earlier in the 60s and then there. And in one of them, I don't remember anymore. The New York Times wrote, so it helped me, God. In recent years, Negroes in Harlem have become increasingly frustrated by their situation.

In recent years, which meant, of course, the New York Times had been not paying any attention whatsoever to Harlem for 100 years. And it was a wonderful moment of recognition that the whole question of race had been largely put aside, even by the finest of the establishment press. My brother was working for the New York Herald Tribune, for a while, at the beginning of that period, actually, of the Freedom Rides, which was early in the 1960s. And he covered Brooklyn for the Herald Tribune. And one time, he called up and said, my God, I've got a mass murder out here. There are seven people who have been killed. And the guy on the other end said, what's the address? And he told him, he said, that's not a story.

And my brother said, what do you mean, that's not a story. Seven people are dead and a slaughter. He said they're black people. Go on to something else. This is not a story for us. And that was the establishment Republican newspaper of the time in New York's Herald Tribune in 1961. There was a damsel thing. He called me up and told me that story, and I said, that can't be, yes, it is. So I don't remember the specifics of that uprising because I was going to be more traumatized. But when it became clear that the sword cut two ways, first, you had television working on your behalf of change in the South because of the absurdity and brutality and bestiality of much of the Southern reaction. But of course, what looks bad when whites do it, looks bad when blacks do it. And so when things started to burn and you had people yelling, burn, baby, burn, I swear I wrote in editorial, said, this is the beginning of the end. You're going to scare the crap out of white America and deliver by little, you're going

to lose them. Tom King-Gulf. Two things happen. On August 2nd, the destroyer-