Forrest Carter

Forrest Carter was the pen name of Asa Earl Carter, an American segregationist speechwriter, Ku Klux Clan leader turned author of Western novels. Carter was born the second child of Hermione and Ralph Carter in Anniston Alabama in 1925. He attended the Calhoun County High School and went on to serve in the American Navy during the Second World War. He would later study journalism at the University of Colorado and marry his childhood sweetheart India Thelma, while living in Birmingham, Alabama. Given his journalism degree, he found a job in a Birmingham radio station WILD, where he made a name for himself for spewing vile racist and anti-Semitic speeches to a receptive audience. He also served as writer and publisher of The Southerner, a white supremacist magazine. Carter was one of the founding members of the original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy, a white supremacist paramilitary organization. The organization was found responsible for the 1957 castration of a random African-American man from the suburbs, and the 1956 senseless beating of the performer Nat King Cole. While he was not involved in the above infractions, Carter would be charged with shooting two of the Klan over money owed, even though he was eventually found not culpable.