Friends of horace carter are gathering this evening... not at a funeral home... but at the offices of his newspaper in Tabor City.
It's only fitting.
Horace Carter was a small town giant of journalism.
He earned the profession's highest honor... the Pulitzer Prize in 1953.
His reporting on the Ku Klux Klan was fearless at a time when fear was rampant... that's how those characters operated in the small town south.
Bear in mind that Horace Carter also owned the Tabor City Tribune... so he was risking his business and his life to expose the ugliness of some his own neighbors.
According to the Pulitzer website, Mr. Carter's work, and that of the Whiteville News Reporter, helped lead to the conviction of more than one-hundred klansmen and an end to terrorism in their communities.
Horace Carter was awarded an honory P-H-D from his alma mater UNC-Chapel Hill.... where an endowed professorship in Journalism was established in his name in 2007.
... fitting memorials to a fellow journalist who stood tall in the face of intense pressure, who acted on principle rather than self-interest, a man who upheld the highest callings of our profession.
Horace Carter's funeral will be held tomorrow at eleven at Tabor City Baptist Church.
By: Steve Rondinaro
Horace Carter
Thank you for such a sweet and wonderful article about Mr. Carter. He was a truely brave person to write about the KKK at the time in which he wrote. Being from Tabor City, I remember my parents, aunt and uncle and grandparents wondering at his sanity. His two children were about the same ages as my cousin and myself and we often played together. I was always in awe of him, thought he was some sort of "super" man. I enjoyed your article. Thank you again.