Betty Carter; Aided Husband’s Editorial Crusade Against Racism

Betty Werlein Carter, a journalist who helped her husband, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor Hodding Carter II, crusade against racism through editorials and articles in the newspaper they founded, the Mississippi Delta Democrat-Times, has died.

Carter, 89, died Thursday at her New Orleans home of complications related to pulmonary hypertension.

A feature writer, Carter was also acknowledged as “the editor’s editor” who polished her husband’s prose. Her husband won a Pulitzer in 1946 for a strongly anti-racist editorial titled “Go for Broke.” She was a civic leader who fought to open a community dialogue on integration, once guarding the family home against threats from the Ku Klux Klan with a shotgun across her knees.

“They formed a pretty good team,” former Mississippi Gov. William Winter, a longtime family friend, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune this week. “They were writing things that did not endear them to a great many people in this part of the country at that time, and so she formed a very strong backup to him in his crusading efforts . . . and was as fearless as he was.”

Carter was the eldest of four children in a family that prized intellectual rigor and civic activism. Her mother, Elizebeth Werlein, led the fight to preserve the French Quarter’s architecture and opened their home to stimulating guests. Carter once recalled walking downstairs to find a group of men drafting a constitution for Mexico.

She attended Newcomb College at Tulane University in New Orleans, where she met and fell in love with Hodding Carter, already working as a reporter for a local paper. After marrying in 1931, they moved to Jackson, Miss. There Carter joined a ladies’ bridge club and her husband covered the Louisiana Legislature for Associated Press.

When Hodding Carter was fired for insubordination, their lives took a dramatic turn.

“I always thank God Hodding got fired,” Carter once told a reporter. “It saved me from a life of playing bridge.”

The couple moved to Hodding’s hometown of Hammond, La., and started their first paper, the Daily Courier, in 1932. Carter sold ads while her husband launched an editorial crusade against Huey Long, the Depression-era demagogue who was a Louisiana governor and then U.S. senator.

Hodding was so fiercely opposed to the politician known as the Kingfish that when Long was reported shot by a man in a white linen suit, Carter rushed to the closet to make sure her husband’s white suit was there. It was.

After Long was assassinated, the Carters moved to Greenville, Miss. Backed by a community group that wanted a strong newspaper, they founded the Daily Star. Two years later, they bought the Democrat-Times and merged the two papers into the Delta Democrat-Times. Carter served in various posts, including features editor, farm page editor, women’s editor and editor of the land use section.

When her husband died in 1972, their son, Hodding Carter III, took over. He left for Washington in 1977 to serve as State Department spokesman in the Jimmy Carter administration. He later became a nationally syndicated columnist, educator and president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, founded by the Knight newspaper family. The Carters sold the Democrat-Times in 1980.

Betty Carter led the Mississippi public broadcasting board, helped establish free public kindergartens in Mississippi and wrote for such magazines as Smithsonian and American Heritage.

She also wrote a book about mules, a subject that intrigued her, perhaps because she identified with its status as a lowly workhorse.

“She identified very strongly with the mule . . . because there’s no glory attached to being a mule,” son Philip Carter, a New Orleans developer, told the Times-Picayune. “You do all the work. For much of her life, Mother has been doing an awful lot of work. Some felt she was never fully recognized for the exemplary toil.”