Forrest Carter — a Klansman who wrote as a Cherokee orphan

Summary

"Forrest Carter," the soft-spoken Cherokee storyteller whose 1976 book The Education of Little Tree was sold as the true memoir of an orphaned boy raised by his Indian grandparents in the Depression-era mountains, was Asa Earl Carter — a Ku Klux Klan organizer and segregationist speechwriter from Alabama. The connection was reported by The New York Times in August 1976, when Carter was still alive, and was documented conclusively by the historian Dan T. Carter in The New York Times on 4 October 1991, after the book became a paperback best-seller. The tender chronicle of Cherokee wisdom had been written by a man whose documented public life had been devoted to white supremacy.

Asa Carter's record is a matter of plain historical fact. Born in Anniston, Alabama, on 4 September 1925, he ran a segregationist radio program in the 1950s, founded the paramilitary "Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy," and was associated with extreme violence: members of his Klan group attacked the singer Nat King Cole on a Birmingham stage in 1956, and in 1957 six of his followers abducted and castrated a Black man, Edward Aaron. Carter wrote speeches for Governor George Wallace and is credited with Wallace's 1963 line, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." After a failed 1970 run for governor — to Wallace's right — he reinvented himself.

That reinvention was the imposture. Carter moved to Texas, took the name "Forrest" (after the Confederate general and early Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest), claimed Cherokee ancestry, and wrote Westerns and then a fake memoir. The Education of Little Tree appropriated a Cherokee identity and voice to tell a gentle story of Indigenous wisdom — written by a man whose career had been built on racial hatred, and whose "Cherokee" detail Cherokee readers later judged inaccurate and stereotyped.

The deception was exposed twice and survived the first exposure by years. The 1976 Times report did not stop the persona; Carter publicly denied being Asa, kept writing, and died in 1979 still claiming the invented life. Only in 1991, when Little Tree topped the paperback list and won a booksellers' award as cherished nonfiction, did the full account land — after which the Times moved the book from its nonfiction list to its fiction list, registering that the memoir was an invention.

Timeline

The documented life of Asa Earl Carter

Before there was a Forrest Carter there was Asa Earl Carter, and his life is one of the better-documented careers on the violent American far right of the mid-twentieth century. Born in Anniston, Alabama, in 1925, Carter emerged in the 1950s as a segregationist broadcaster, running a syndicated Birmingham radio program that mixed anti-integration politics with antisemitic and white-supremacist themes. He moved from rhetoric to organization, founding the "Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy," a paramilitary Klan group separate from and more extreme than the established Klan structures of the day.

That group's record is brutal and on the record. In 1956 men associated with Carter's Klan attacked the singer Nat King Cole during a performance in Birmingham. In 1957 six members of his group abducted a Black handyman, Edward Aaron, at random and castrated him — a crime intended as terror. Carter himself was charged in connection with shooting two members of his own group in a dispute, though the charges were dropped. He published a white-supremacist periodical and built a public identity entirely around the defense of segregation.

Carter's reach extended into mainstream Alabama politics through George Wallace. As a speechwriter for Wallace in the early 1960s, he is credited with the most famous sentence of segregationist oratory — "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" — delivered at Wallace's 1963 inauguration. When Wallace later moderated his public posture, Carter ran for governor himself in 1970 as an unreconstructed segregationist and was crushed. From that political dead end the second self emerged. None of this background is in dispute; it is the verifiable foundation against which the gentleness of his later persona must be read.

The making of a Cherokee storyteller

The reinvention was deliberate and pointed. Carter left Alabama for Texas, set aside "Asa," and took the first name "Forrest" — a choice that, however he framed it, echoed Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and early Klan figure. He let it be understood that he was of Cherokee descent, a man of the Western outdoors and Native heritage, and he turned to fiction. His Western The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (1972), reissued as Gone to Texas, was adapted into Clint Eastwood's well-regarded 1976 film The Outlaw Josey Wales, lending the new name commercial credibility.

Then came the masterstroke of the imposture: a memoir. The Education of Little Tree, published in 1976, was presented as Forrest Carter's own boyhood — an orphaned part-Cherokee child sent to live with his grandparents in the Tennessee mountains during the Depression, learning Cherokee ways, mountain self-reliance, and a gentle, anti-materialist wisdom. The book's voice was tender, its values communal and ecological, its grandfather and grandmother dispensers of Indigenous insight. It was, on its face, the antithesis of everything Asa Carter had publicly stood for, which is precisely why so few connected the kindly narrator to the Klan organizer.

The appropriation here is twofold and worth naming directly. Carter took a Cherokee identity he did not possess and used it to manufacture authenticity for a sentimental fable; Cherokee readers and scholars later noted that the book's "Cherokee" words and customs were inaccurate and its Indigenous characters stereotyped. A white supremacist had borrowed the cultural authority of a Native people to sell a feel-good memoir to the very liberal, multicultural audience his earlier career had despised — and the borrowing worked because readers wanted the wisdom the persona seemed to offer and had no reason to suspect its source.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The Education of Little Tree survived its unmasking commercially and pedagogically, which is part of what makes the case enduring. For years after 1991 it remained in print, was taught in schools, and was adapted into a 1997 film, even as its true authorship was a matter of public record; many readers continued to embrace the book as a novel or to separate the writing from the writer. The episode became a standard reference in debates over whether and how a work can be read apart from the documented life and intentions of its author.

For Cherokee people and for scholars of Native representation, the harm is specific and lasting. A white supremacist appropriated a Cherokee identity, populated a best-selling "memoir" with inaccurate and stereotyped versions of Cherokee language and culture, and taught a mass audience to receive that counterfeit as authentic Indigenous wisdom — all while the actual Cherokee Nation had no part in it. The case is now cited alongside other impostures of Indigenous identity as an example of how appropriation can pass for tribute, and how a marketplace hungry for "authentic" Native voices can be served a fabrication built by someone hostile to the people he claimed. The most honest summary the record permits is blunt: the gentleness on the page was real as craft and false as testimony, and the man who produced it was, by his own documented history, an organizer of racial terror.

Lessons

References

• Asa Earl Carter WIKIPEDIA
• The Education of Little Tree WIKIPEDIA
• Asa Carter (Forrest Carter) ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ALABAMA
• The Artful Reinvention of Klansman Asa Earl Carter NPR