Asa Earl Carter - Career

Career

Carter worked for several area radio 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 Wallace's 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:

"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. 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".