Author’s Note:
City of Grudges is dedicated to Hodding Carter II, the founder of my hometown newspaper.
As the owner, publisher and editor of the Delta Democrat Times in Greenville, Mississippi, Carter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for a series of editorials on the ill treatment of Japanese American soldiers returning from World War II.
Carter became known as the “Spokesman of the New South” as he challenged segregation and the state’s Jim Crow laws. When he wrote an article for Look magazine on the rise of the White Citizens Councils, a successor to the Ku Klux Klan, state lawmakers attacked the article on the floor of the Mississippi House of Representatives for being a “willful lie by a nigger-loving editor.”
His grandchildren lived a few houses down the street from my home. Our families were close, and “Big Hodding” has been an inspiration for my journalism.
– Rick Outzen