The Real Education of Little Tree
How the author of a current best-seller conned the world into believing he was a gentle Texas novelist instead of a vicious Alabama Klansman.
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Later that year, Carter formed a white citizens council. Throughout the South, the citizens council movement was gaining support as a respectable segregationist alternative to the Ku Klux Klan. Membership began to boom after the Montgomery bus boycott got under way in December 1955; at one time, Carter’s group claimed thirty to forty chapters. But Carter soon ran into trouble with other Alabama citizen council leaders because, once again, his views were too extreme: He wouldn’t allow Jews in his group. “We believe that this is basically a battle between Christianity and atheistic communism,” he told a reporter. He saw conservative values threatened everywhere — even in the Blondie comic strip, where, he said, Dagwood’s foolishness undermined fatherhood. He picketed a rock concert with signs that said, “Jungle Music Promotes Integration” and “Bebop Promotes Communism.”
In the mid-fifties, Asa Carter always seemed to be on the periphery of violence. Although he denied that he was a member of the Klan, his signature appears on the articles of incorporation of a shadowy paramilitary gang called the Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy, whose members met secretly and wore Rebel-gray robes. Meetings were called to order with the thrust of a sword into the floor and a knife into the speaker’s stand. In 1957, two men were wounded and left for dead in a gunfight at a statewide meeting of Carter’s Klan. One of them later identified Asa as the robed and hooded man who had shot him, but the state never prosecuted the case. On Labor Day, 1957, six alleged members of his Klan abducted a black handyman, sliced off his scrotum, and tortured him by pouring turpentine on his wounds. Buddy Barnett says Asa was scornful of the way his cohorts had treated the black man. He says Carter told him, “It would have been better to have killed him than to do that.”
In his speeches, Asa openly advocated violence. Newspapers reported that at one rally he vowed to put his “blood on the ground” to halt integration; at another, he said of the federal government, “If it’s violence they want, it’s violence they will get.”
Even among his most resistant segreationist circles in the South, Carter’s tactics were beyond the pale. Eventually he was drummed out of the citizens council movement. In the spring of 1958, he made a pitiful stab at the Democratic primary for state lieutenant governor and finished fifth in a five-man field. Dispirited, he was quoted in a newspaper article as calling the Klan leadership “a bunch of trash.” And then just when Asa hit bottom, he hooked up with someone who offered fresh hope.
IN 1958, A YOUNG LAWYER NAMED GEORGE WALLACE ran for governor of Alabama against the state’s attorney general, John Patterson. Backed by the Klan, Patterson campaigned for a white Alabama and trounced Wallace, who was considered a moderate. After the election, Asa Carter was invited to join the Wallace team as a speech writer. Wallace was a skilled extemporaneous speaker: very forceful but only in spurts. Ace — as he was known to Wallace’s men — had a talent for inflated images and grandiloquent language. “Wallace wanted him to use hate,” says Seymore Trammell, Wallace’s former finance director. “He wanted it real strong.”
But Carter’s sinister reputation presented a problem. Nervous about their candidate’s being linked with Carter, Wallace’s men arranged for him to be paid sub rosa through various Wallace cronies — a Montgomery printer, a road contractor, and an insurance executive. At Wallace’s campaign headquarters, Carter was given a rear office, where he could work unnoticed. After Wallace’s victory in 1962, Carter took over a cubbyhole in the basement of the capitol. “We would go into the room, and by the time we got through talking for two hours, we’d get him riled up,” says Trammell. “We fed him raw meat. We would treat him almost like an animal — like you would give a race-horse a shot.” Carter would take a pack of Pall Malls, close the door, and emerge hours later with a riveting speech.
Wallace’s 1963 inaugural address — delivered on the steps of the Alabama state capitol, where Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as president of the Confederacy — was a call to arms for the embattled people of Alabama: “In the name of the greatest people that ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say: Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” The audience leapt to their feet. Six months later, in Tuscaloosa, Wallace delivered his “Standing in the schoolhouse door” speech, also largely written by Ace Carter. These speeches helped propel Wallace to national prominence.
But Carter frightened even Wallace’s toughest men. A large man with a barrel chest, jet-black hair, and thick eyebrows, he exuded an air of danger. He kept an old Webley six-shooter with him at all times. In his personal life, he was circumspect. During the week, he lived at the Jefferson Davis Hotel in Montgomery, where Wallace’s men picked up the tab. On weekends, he would drive 120 miles up to Oxford to see his wife and four children. To his Montgomery friends, who talked politics with him at the Sahara restaurant, he had one weakness: After a few drinks, he turned belligerent. “I would not be around him when he was drinking,” says former Wallace associate Ray Andrews. “He more or less would start foaming at the mouth.”
Increasingly, Carter saw Wallace as the nation’s would-be savior. If he could make it to the presidency, he could prevent the country from falling prey to the evils of integration and communism. When Wallace was excluded from the governor’s race in 1966 because of a nonsuccession rule, he toyed with a run for the Senate. But Carter was among those who discouraged him; he thought Wallace would have to make too many compromising stands. Instead, he encouraged Wallace’s wife, Lurleen, to run for governor. After she won the election, Lurleen wanted to make Ace her press secretary, but her husband’s staff thought that was too controversial, so he continued to write speeches. When Lurleen died of ovarian cancer after only eighteen months in office, Carter was once again out of a job.
In 1968, when Wallace ran for president on a third-party ticket, Carter made several trips through the Midwest with Bobby Shelton, the Grand Wizard from Tuscaloosa, drumming up support for the campaign. But by then Wallace had tempered his racial rhetoric, and Carter’s skills as a speech writer were no longer helpful. He wanted Wallace to use language like “race mixing,” while Wallace insisted on “busing.” For Carter, Wallace’s political shift was a profound betrayal. So complete was his estrangement from Wallace that in 1970, Carter even ran against him as a Democratic candidate for the governor’s seat. His platform was predictable: anti-integration, anti-pornography, anti-Red movie writers in Hollywood. One Montgomery lobbyist recalls watching Carter campaign at the Talladegah County courthouse, protected by a phalanx of bodyguards. On the lawn before him was a large crowd, including a group of blacks trying to disrupt his speech by heckling. Carter kept gesturing to the blacks and saying, “This is a nigger mentality. This is typical slave mentality. This is all they know how to do.”
One of five candidates in the primary, Carter came in last, with only 15,000 votes. Then he made what must have been a humiliating pact: In exchange for the payment of his campaign debts, he agreed to write speeches for Wallace in the runoff against liberal Albert Brewer. But in his heart, Carter felt Wallace was a traitor. At Wallace’s inauguration in January 1971, Carter picketed with signs that said, “Wallace Is a Bigot” and “Free Our White Children.” Shortly after the ceremony, reporter Wayne Greenhaw recalls Carter’s complaining bitterly that Wallace had compromised his Southern ideals just when the fate of the nation hung in the balance. “If we keep on the way we’re going, with the mixing of the races, destroying God’s plan,” Carter told Greenhaw, “there won’t be an earth on which to live in five years.” When Carter finished, tears were streaming down his face. “You could see this horribly tortured human being,” Greenhaw says, “a totally defeated person.”
After that, Carter tried to found a string of all-white private schools, then feuded with Alabama attorney general Bill Baxley over taxes. In the Southerner, he raved because Baxley had appointed a “bushy headed black buck” as his assistant. Carter also blasted Wallace for letting blacks join the state highway patrol. “Soon,” Carter wrote, “you can expect your wife or daughter to be pulled over to the side of the road by one of these Ubangi or Watusi tribesmen wearing the badge of Anglo-Saxon law enforcement and toting a gun … but as uncivilized as the day his kind were found eating their kin in the jungle.”
In early 1971, Carter set up a statewide paramilitary organization whose members wore gray armbands with Confederate flags. Like his earlier political ventures, this one ended in failure. After one speech, a reporter wrote, Carter “seemed to have lost his spirit as he marched back and forth in a cadence before his assembly with a memorized speech. he drew but one applause.” The following year, Carter was arrested three times on alcohol-related charges. Then he seemed to drop from sight.
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