Hodding Carter

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This article is about Hodding Carter II, the journalist. For his son, the Jimmy Carter White House aide, see Hodding Carter III

William Hodding Carter II, was born in Hammond, LA on February 3, 1907, and was a noted progressive journalist and author. He died on April 4, 1972 in Greenville, MS of a heart attack.

Carter attended Bowdoin College in Maine, and returned to Louisiana upon graduating in 1927. His first newspaper was the Hammond Daily Courier, which he started in 1932. The paper was noted for its opposition to Huey Long.

He also wrote editorials in the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times regarding social and economic intolerance in the deep South that won him widespread acclaim and the moniker "Spokesman of the New South." He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his editorials, in particular a series lambasting the ill-treatment of Japanese-American (Nisei) soldiers returning from World War II. He was a professor for a single semester at Tulane University in New Orleans.

One of Carter's more memorable quotes is, "Television news is like a lightning flash. It makes a loud noise, lights up everything around it, leaves everything else in darkness and then is suddenly gone." He is also famous for saying, "There are two things we should give our children: one is roots and the other is wings."