Unmasking the Klansman: The Double Life of Asa and Forrest Carter

Confederate Ghost Dancer: Asa Carter and the Dream of a White America, reads like a work of imagination but is actually a biography that is the result of three decades of digging and shoe leather by a distinguished Southern historian. Carter was a racist and anti-semite from north Alabama who led a KKK group that fire-bombed a Freedom Riders' bus, assaulted voting rights activists, and more. He surfaced in 1963 as the ghostwriter of George C. Wallace's fiery inauguration vow of segregation now, tomorrow, forever. And then he dropped out of sight. Few knew that he had taken up a second life as a novelist and screenwriter. One of his books was made into a movie starring Clint Eastwood. Another was The Education of Little Tree, purporting to be the autobiographical tale of an Indian boy and his grandparents. Historian Dan T. Carter (no relation to his subject) picked up the fascinating and contradictory threads of Asa Earl Carter's double lives while researching his seminal book on Wallace, The Politics of Rage. He was interested from the start in writing about Asa/Forrest Carter, but few would talk on the record. He put his research on the back burner, but kept following occasional leads. In 2019 and 2021, he gained access to a trove of interviews another writer had conducted at a time when many of the principals in the story were still alive. Those materials and his original research from the 1990s finally brought the story into focus, and Confederate Ghost Dancer is the result. The story is worthwhile as solid history about the role of white supremacists during the civil rights period in the Deep South, but it also opens a window to what Klansman Carter's life and his ideas may tell us about the current wave of white Christian nationalism that has attracted millions of white Americans who see their dominant status slipping away.