Upon completion of his fellowship, he took a job at the Item-Tribune in New Orleans and later as the Night Bureau manager for the United Press. In 1930 he moved to Jackson, Miss., where he worked as the Bureau Manager for the Associated Press.
He was fired from his position at AP for “insubordination,” and his supervisor advised him to choose a new career, for he “would never make a newspaper man, and (he) ought not waste any time getting into another business.” To prove him wrong, Carter and his wife Betty Werlein returned to Hammond and opened the Daily Courier.
Carter later admitted the main goal of the Daily Courier was to highlight the wrong doings of Congressman Huey Long. His efforts succeeded, for his district was the only one in Louisiana to never send an associate of Long's to Congress.
In 1935, Carter attended a literary conference in Baton Rouge, La. where he met David Cohn who convinced him to open a newspaper in Greenville, Miss.
By 1936, Carter was publishing the Delta Star in Greenville. Carter and his wife soon bought out the only other daily in Greenville, the Democrat Times, and merged the two papers to create the Delta Democrat-Times in 1938.
In 1939, Carter accepted a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University and by 1940, had become editor of Ralph Ingersoll’s publication PM. His stint at PM was short-lived and Carter returned to his newspapers.
Having joined the National Guard in 1938, Carter was sent overseas in 1940 as the Public Relations Officer for his regiment. He lost sight in one eye during a training exercise, but continued to write for Yank and Stars and Stripes out of Cairo, Egypt.
He received an Honorable Discharge from the U.S. Armed Services in 1945 and returned to Greenville.
He wrote a series of articles dealing with racial, economic and religious problems in Mississippi, and in May of 1946, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. A few months later, Carter established another newspaper, the Delta Star.
Carter’s health was slowly deteriorating, and in June of 1966 he officially handed control of the Delta Democrat-Times to his son William Hodding Carter III in June of 1966.
Carter received the 10th Annual First Federation Award for his service to Mississippi and the Columbia University Journalism Award.
On April 4, 1972, Carter died of heart failure. His two surviving sons wrote editorials about him in the Delta-Democrat Times.
"If I have gained anything in life, it is a belief in the soul and the destiny of man." - William Hodding Carter II
Early Racist
Although Carter would receive wide acclaim for his editorials condemning racist practices, Carter was, for much of his life, a racist.
While at Bowdoin College, Carter went so far as to change dorms because a Black student, Lincoln Johnson, lived in the same building. He would leave the room when Johnson entered, and was an outspoken white supremacist who believed the South should have won the Civil War and the slaves should not have been freed.
Both Carter’s grandfathers had fought on the side of the Confederacy and were members of the Ku Klux Klan.
After his college days, his attitude towards race problems changed. One is allowed to change.... Right? Mine certainly did. I was one of his students at Tulane.
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