W. Horace Carter was the editor and publisher of The Tabor City (North Carolina) Tribune , a weekly newspaper he founded in 1946. On July 22, 1950, the Ku Klux Klan staged a demonstration, parading a line of cars packed with armed men wearing hoods, through Tabor City, as part of a recruiting drive.
In the next edition of his newspaper, Carter editorialized strongly against the KKK: “The Klan, despite its Americanism plea, is the personification of Fascism and Nazism,” he editorialized. “It is just such outside-the-law operations that lead to dictatorships through fear and insecurity.”
And that was just the start: over the next three years he kept up the pressure, publishing more than 100 articles and editorials, covering every lynching, shooting and act of domestic terrorism. And Carter did it all despite personal threats from the KKK against the paper, his advertisers, and his family, as well as shunning from his own community.
“He was a God-and-country kind of guy,” said his son, Russell. “But he was committed to social justice, and he was not prepared for the fact that other people didn’t see it that way. He had very meager support, especially early on.”
But he kept it up, and the FBI finally came in to investigate the Klan’s activities in the area, leading to the successful prosecution of 254 Klansmen — including the Grand Dragon of the Association of Carolina Klans, which severely weakened the KKK in the region.
Indeed Carter’s campaign was so successful that another area paper, The Whiteville News Reporter , edited by a friend of Carter, followed his lead, and in 1953 both papers shared a Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service.
The Pulitzer citation read: “For their successful campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, waged on their own doorstep at the risk of economic loss and personal danger, culminating in the conviction of over one hundred Klansmen and an end to terrorism in their communities.”