For decades, The Democrat, as it was known locally, stood for racial moderation in the South — steady, nonviolent progress toward justice, although it considered public school integration unwise and federal anti-lynching laws unnecessary. It condemned the Ku Klux Klan, and it covered the news of racial outrages with an accuracy and impartiality that was lacking in most Southern newspapers.
Hodding Carter Jr., the publisher, who won a Pulitzer in 1946 for his editorials, 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 brothers sometimes saw their father sitting out on the porch with a shotgun at night, awaiting an attack that never came.
Hodding III attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire but graduated from Greenville High School in 1953 and from Princeton in 1957.
In 1957, he married Margaret Ainsworth, known as Peggy. The couple had a son, Hodding Carter IV, and three daughters, Catherine, Margaret and Finn, before the marriage ended in divorce in 1978. That year, he married Patricia Derian, an assistant secretary of state for human rights. She died in 2016 at 86.
In 2019, he married Patricia Ann O’Brien, an author and retired reporter who worked in the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau and at The Chicago Sun-Times.
In addition to his daughter Catherine, he is survived by his wife; his children Hodding IV, Finn Carter and Margaret Carter Joseph; his stepchildren Mike, Craig and Brooke Derian; a brother, Philip; and 12 grandchildren.
In 1959, after two years in the Marine Corps, Mr. Carter gave up plans to go into the Foreign Service and returned to Greenville. “We felt that we owed it to Dad and the paper to go back there and give it one year,” he recalled in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 1977.
