Delta Prizewinner

Hodding Carter still remembers two disturbing things from his Louisiana boyhood. He was only six when he saw a yelping gang of white boys chasing a Negro kid. Several years later, he came upon the pendant body of a lynch victim. Those violent pictures never faded from his mind. Last week, for flaying racism wherever he found it, Editor Hodding Carter, 39, of the Greenville, Miss. Delta Democrat Times, won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize ($500)* for distinguished editorial writing. Especially cited: his plea for fairness to returning Nisei soldiers.

Carters v. Kingfish. Hodding Carter never expected any medals for being a fighting Southern liberal editor. Says he: "You don't have to be brave any more." But more than once, he and his wife have been. Just after he and pretty Betty Werlein were married, Carter was fired (for insubordination) from his $50-a-week A.P. job in 1932.

With their entire capital of $367, the newlyweds went to Carter's home town of Hammond, La. to start a daily. They lived over the shop, bartered ads for meat and vegetables, used their struggling paper to fight Huey Long tooth & nail. Theirs was the only district in the state that never sent a Long henchman to Congress.

In 1936, the year after the Kingfish was killed, the Carters sold out their Louisiana paper, moved to Greenville. As a kind of personal protest against Munich, Editor Carter enlisted in the National Guard. He lost the sight of his right eye in a training-camp exercise in Florida (he walked into a palmetto).

Pen & Sword. During the war, while his wife worked for OWI, Carter launched Yank and Stars and Stripes in the Middle East. He found time to write Winds of Fear, a novel attacking small-town Negro-phobes; and Lower Mississippi, for the Rivers of America series. He came out of the Army a major in Intelligence.

The Carters' friends know them as people who stick up for their ideals, but with no note of dreary, earnest dedication about them. The townspeople respect Carter's editorial policy, even if they don't always share it. The Carters and their three sons spend summers in Rockport, Me. (Carter's idea of fun would be "to run a Republican paper in Mississippi, a Democratic paper in Maine.")

In the Carters' Delta county, where two-thirds of the 65,000 people are Negroes, there has been no lynching in his lifetime.

* Other winners: The Scranton Times, public service; Reporters William L. Laurence and Arnaldo Cortesi (New York Times), Homer Bigart (New York Herald Tribune), Edward A. Harris (St. Louis Post-Dispatch); Cartoonist Bruce Russell (Los Angeles Times). History: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s Age of Jackson. Biography: Linnie M. Wolfe's Son of the Wilderness. Play: Lindsay & Grouse's State of the Union. Music: Leo Sowerby's Canticle of the Sun. Novel and poem: no award.

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