Hodding Carter - Criticism

Criticism

Columnist Eric Alterman, in a book review of The Race Beat (2006) for The Nation discusses how Carter and other Southern journalists were "moderate defenders", of the South. That is, they were apologists for the South during the pre-civil rights era. Alterman says, "'Enlightened'" Southern editors, especially. . . Mississippi's Hodding Carter, Jr., sold a Chalabi-like dream of steady, nonviolent progress that belied the violent savagery that lay in wait for those who stepped out of line." One of the reasons segregation had been a success, Alterman explains, is "...the way newspapers had neglected it."

Ann Waldron, in her book Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist makes the case that Carter crusaded for racial equality, but hedged on condemning segregation and after the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, he attacked intransigent White Citizens' Council, but supported only gradual integration.

In defense of Carter, Claude Sitton, in a review of Waldron's book in the New York Times says, "eaders of today will ask how an editor who opposed enactment of a federal antilynching law as unnecessary and public school desegregation in Mississippi as unwise can be called a champion of racial justice. The answer, which she gives in the book's introduction, lies in the context of the times. . . . Absent his efforts and those of other Southern editors of courage and like mind, change would have come far more slowly and at far greater cost."