Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist.

Matthews, John M.

Hodding Carter, modern Mississippi's most illustrious newspaperman, has met his first biographer. While not the equal of Carter's own eloquent memoir, Where Main Street Meets the River, this book is particularly helpful in chronicling his editorship of the Delta Democrat-Times of Greenville and in exploring his complex and convoluted responses to the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. Ann Waldron pays attention to Carter's family circle; and, with a great many quotations from his friends and relatives, she has considerable success in conveying something about his personality, in fact in bringing him to life. Moreover, this biography encompasses the years between 1953, when Carter's own book appeared, and his death in 1972.

It was a life that revolved around writing and the newspaper business. Carter came from what appears to have been a relatively well-off family in Hammond, Louisiana; after growing up there and getting an education at Bowdoin College in Maine, a curious choice, Carter became a journalist. For four years in the early 1930s, he edited an anti-Huey Long paper in Hammond, sold it in 1936, and then accepted an invitation from some of the luminaries of Greenville, among them William A. Percy and David Cohn, to start up a new paper there, first with the title Delta Star, and then after 1938 the Delta Democrat-Times. During the rest of his professional life, Carter made it one of the South's most outspoken newspapers and won for himself national respect and reputation and a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1946. Its columns endorsed the latter phases of the New Deal, later denounced fascism, Bilbo, and McCarthy, asked for better schools for the children of sharecroppers, and called attention to problems in the prison at Parchman.

However, nothing so defined Carter's significance as his evolution into a combative spokesman for better treatment of black Southerners and for improved race relations. It is not a surprise that as a young man Carter embraced the racial convictions and prejudices of white people of his class from the deep South; and it is not a wonder that in a New England college in the 1920s, provoked by students from a vastly different background, he spoke the feelings of a young Louisianan. Since his original attitudes are difficult to uncover, this early and sketchy evidence seems suspect. This book's overheated title probably exaggerates the extent to which Carter altered his thinking on race; racial prejudices they may well have been; hard-bitten racism, probably not.

Carter's ultimate position was a difficult one to reach and maintain. He deplored the separate and unequal justice with which white Southerners dealt with blacks, denounced violence and lynching, fulminated against the Klan and the Citizens' Councils. At the same time he realized that white Mississippi would have to come to its own change of heart about these matters, so he opposed federal intervention in Southern affairs and worried about fanaticism in the civil rights movement. He found the court's ruling in the Brown case proper and morally obligatory, but he doubted that true desegregation was possible in the South. His tone could easily turn defensive; his advice was that the region be permitted to proceed slowly and be allowed to resolve its own glaring problems. Illuminating as it did a dilemma facing a number of Southern moderates, it was an ambiguous and slippery place to try to stand; even so, it brought Carter vociferous criticism, on which he seemed to thrive.

Waldron's biography is particularly relevatory in its portrayal of Carter as he made his painful progress toward a more modern South. How and why this happened are much less clear. Newspaper editors write columns almost every day and on a multitude of topics; it is not easy for a biographer to discern patterns of coherent analysis and thinking in such fragmented sources. Nevertheless, one wishes that Waldron had tried harder to do so, or at least to explore the sources of the positions Carter took. What made him the man he was and what explained his evolution toward racial moderation remain obscure. He was not the only Southern newspaperman of his generation to move in this direction - Harry Ashmore and Ralph McGill come to mind - but this book would be a much better one if it placed Carter more securely in a cultural and journalistic context and related his transit to those of many others in the same time and place.

In this affectionate but not uncritical portrait, Hodding Carter the man lives and breathes a bit, and readers are likely to agree that his was a worthy life and a meaningful career. In the face of the present dilapidated state of Southern journalism, the book is also a powerful reminder of what now seems an ancient time, when the region's editors were important people and when newspapers really mattered.

JOHN M. MATTHEWS Georgia State University