Good evening, everyone:

Last week, one of the most powerful allies of the civil rights movement passed away: Hodding Carter III. A newspaper publisher, a civil rights advocate, the State Department spokesperson during the Iranian Hostage Crisis, host of the PBS public affairs program “The Inside Story” (for which he won multiple Emmys), the president of the Knight Foundation, and a wonderful friend.

Hodding grew up in the 1960’s deep south as part of a newspaper publishing family. His father – “Big Hodding” – was the publisher of The Greenville [Mississippi] Delta Democrat-Times,, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his staunch advocacy for desegregation, civil rights, and equal justice.  The New York Times wrote: “[Big Hodding] was revered by many liberals and members of the journalistic fraternity but widely regarded as the most hated man in Mississippi. There were obscene calls and death threats, effigy hangings, burning crosses and boycotts against the newspaper.” The newspaper offices were fire-bombed three times under his son’s tenure in the 1960’s.

Hodding took over the paper from his father in 1959, when he was 24 years old, and went on to serve as its publisher and editor for seventeen years.  The Times wrote: As the civil rights struggle spread across the South in the 1960s, [Hodding’s writings] became more strident, condemning the brutality of police officers who attacked nonviolent demonstrators and politicians who upheld white supremacy.” When asked in 1977 why he had been such a champion of civil rights during such a difficult era, Hodding replied: “Now the question is less dramatic for a Southerner — it’s what do you want to do for the next few years? We — the South — are on the plateau the rest of the nation wanted us to get to.”

Hodding carried his activism into politics, briefly rising to a potential vice-presidential candidate in the 1972 Democratic National Convention that nominated George McGovern to the top of the ticket. My friend – and a colleague of our ACP and Communications teams – Alan Stone got to know Hodding during that period. Alan recently wrote to me:

Such was the place of Big Hodding in the bosom of American liberalism that he dined with RFK and his family in Los Angeles the night before the primary, and Bobby's death.

[A friend and I were delegates to the convention, he from Mississippi and I from Colorado. In the lead-up to the convention],

we drove to Greenville from Santa Fe where we were working for The New Mexico Review. Before we all continued on our way to Florida, we met with Hodding at the paper as he was pondering running for VP. He ended up withdrawing after getting a concession on a civil rights matter . . . . But he needed a pamphlet and some campaign materials for this effort and was brainstorming, frustrated and feeling time pressure. I said, "you've written 5,00 editorials on every major issue, why not pick excerpts from some, add photos, and you'll have a pamphlet." [That’s exactly what he did] – and so, unbeknownst to me at the time, began my own so-called career in politics and communications!

[Attached below is Alan’s friend’s sketch of that car trip – note the Hodding Carter for VP banner trailing behind them]

Then of course I knew him and Pat [Patricia Derian, Hodding’s wife, who was appointed by President Carter to be the first Assistant Secretary of State of Human Rights] when they were in DC and I was working on the Hill. They were great company, wore their prominence lightly, and made history in different and important ways. I have always thought that creating an Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights was the greatest thing President Carter did because it embodied our best ideals, and gave us a way to magnify them everywhere.

I came to know Hodding when he and I sat next to each other at Living Cities Board meetings for six years – he as president of Knight, me as president of McKnight. It was actually hard to sit next to Hodding because of his penchant for telling long, complicated, funny and tragic stories – each one mesmerizing both in the telling and in the substance. I’ll never forget my friend Ed Skloot of the Surdna Foundation turning to me at one point, rolling his eyes, and asking when the storytelling would stop – at least during the business meeting. But as someone new to philanthropy, I couldn’t imagine Hodding stopping – it was like a tutorial in American political, civil rights, and publishing history. I told Ed that I would pay good money to have Hodding keep going.

Hodding and I worked together extensively while he was at Knight, and I was at McKnight. On the Living Cities board . . . through Knight’s prioritization of St. Paul (The St. Paul Pioneer Press was one of the Knight-Ridder publishing sites) . . . and because his extraordinary community development staff became close collaborators. In my annual pilgrimages to make presentations about Detroit to Joel Fleishman’s seminars at Duke, Hodding inevitably came (he was a lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), listened intently, and charitably withheld any skepticism he might have felt about what I had to say.

He was as kind as he was wise . . . as generous as he was tough . . . as practical as he was idealistic. The world is a less joyful, less principled, less decent place without him.

I’ll leave the last word to Alan:

I've known at most a handful who while young blazed as brightly as he did. But then he blazed as brightly in other ways until the very end - in journalism, philanthropy, teaching and writing. I used to tell him that if he were less charming he'd be more famous, and he'd always say he liked things just the way they were.

Rest in peace, Hodding.

Rip

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