One of the remarkable things about Forrest Carter's self-reinvention is how few reminders of his Asa existence still remain. Indeed, aside from a couple of slim pieces of physical evidence, it might be difficult to prove now that Asa and Forrest Carter were the same man.
A few years ago, Buddy Barnett, a childhood friend of Carter's, produced a first edition of "The Rebel Outlaw Josey Wales" with an inscription in Carter's handwriting that reads "Forrest (Asa) Carter." Veteran Alabama journalist Wayne Greenhaw, who first broke the story of the Asa-Forrest Carter connection, had the handwriting in Barnett's copy of "Wales" checked against the sample in Asa Earl Carter's own biography, submitted when he ran for governor in 1970. They matched. In the biography, Carter said that he was born in Oxford, Ala., on Sept. 4, 1925. He claimed his parents, who were dairy farmers, had Cherokee blood in their background, which is either true or a "damn lie," depending on which family member you speak to. Carter's brother Doug insists that the family had no Cherokee ancestors, but Barnett claims that "Asa's mother's people were Cherokee, and Asa was proud of that fact."
Some family members recall that while growing up in the Appalachian hills of north Alabama, young Asa Carter pestered older family members for details about Confederate ancestors on both sides of the family. One rode with Morgan's Raiders, another was a guerrilla fighter with Col. Mosby, the legendary "Grey Ghost." Maybe Carter had heard family stories of Cherokee ancestors, or maybe he heard stories about the Cherokee when growing up near Chocoloco Creek. Both "Wales" and "Little Tree" feature Cherokee Indians who were Confederate officers. In "Little Tree" the boy makes one of them into his own ancestor: "Granma and Granpa spoke of his Pa in his last years. He was an old warrior. He had joined the Confederate raider, John Hunt Morgan, to fight the faraway, faceless monster of "the guv'mint" that threatened his people and his cabin." In "Little Tree" Carter brings together the two strains of his ancestry -- one real and one, it would appear, assumed -- to account for the famed "Rebel Yell": "Exultation ... brought the rebel Indian yell rumbling from his chest and out of his throat, screaming, savage."
Carter graduated from high school in 1942, joined the Navy and became, like his future boss George Wallace, a boxing champ. He told friends he turned down the Army because he wanted to fight the Japanese rather than the Germans, his "racial kin." After the war, Carter married Thelma India Walker, a high school sweetheart, moved to Colorado, and attended the state university. After graduating, he returned to Alabama and established a career as a full-time racist.
Around Birmingham, you can still find copies of the Southerner, a monthly magazine devoted to white supremacy, which Carter helped found. Collectors of civil-rights era memorabilia have copies of his radio broadcasts and pamphlets from his 1970 campaign for governor. In one of these, he warned white Alabamians about the prospect of black policemen: "Soon, 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 (he'll be) as uncivilized as the day his kind were found eating their kin in a jungle."
After getting fired from a radio station for criticizing National Brotherhood Week, Carter formed a group called the White Citizens Council, an organization that espoused the same fundamental views as the KKK. Carter's association didn't last; he couldn't stomach the idea of making a common cause with anti-integrationist Jews, even to segregate blacks.
Instead, he helped create a new and even more virulent organization, the original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy, whose members wore Confederate gray robes instead of white. In Carter's view, the old KKK had become too soft and compromised. Various acts of violence were associated with the new Kluxers, the most famous being the assault on Nat "King" Cole at a concert in Birmingham in 1957. Less well known but far uglier was the 1957 abduction of a black handyman named Edward Aaron who had offended members of Carter's group with inflammatory talk of forced integration. The abductors, never identified, sliced off Aaron's scrotum and poured turpentine on his wounds. According to his childhood pal Buddy Barnett, Carter -- who openly advocated violence in his speeches and articles -- was appalled by the coldbloodedness of the attack. But Don Carter, who wrote a biography of George Wallace, took a darker view, saying, "[Carter] had a long history of violence, in fact, it's not an exaggeration to call him something of a ... psychopath."
By 1958, disillusioned with the new Klan's leadership, whom he called "a bunch of trash," he quit the group. With few prospects and four kids to feed in Anniston, Asa Carter took an ill-advised turn into politics, running for state lieutenant governor. He finished fifth in a five-man field.
Alabama's most powerful moderate in the second half of the decade was George Wallace. In 1958, stunned over his loss in the governor's race to Klan-backed John Patterson, Wallace famously swore to an aide that he'd never be "outsegged" again. (Or, as some of Wallace's less flattering biographers have phrased it, "outniggered.") The solution was the talented but unstable Asa Carter, whom Wallace's aides thought they could keep, as one of them now admits, "under wraps."
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. "He lived out of back offices in Wallace's headquarters," says Wayne Greenhaw. "He'd see his wife and kids on weekends and be a family man. During the weekdays he'd hole up in his room with his typewriter, a quart of whiskey, a dozen packs of Pall Malls and a gun." Adds a former campaign official: "A revolver, an Old West type of gun."
From this back room, Asa Carter wrote the most famous racist rhetoric of the civil rights era, words that would reach and be remembered by more people than anything published by Forrest Carter. From the steps of the Alabama state capitol building, on Inauguration Day, 1963, Wallace delivered the speech that, for sheer grandiloquence, rivals Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream." "In the name of the greatest people that ever tread the earth," thundered Wallace, "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!" Wallace's national reputation was made.
Next page: Carter goes to Hollywood -- and pisses all over the rug