Asa Earl Carter (September 4, 1925 – June 7, 1979) was an American segregationist and Ku Klux Klan organizer who was prominent in the 1950s for his activism and later as a Western fiction novelist, known as a co-writer of George Wallace's well-known pro-segregation line of 1963, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." He ran in the Democratic primary for governor of Alabama as a white supremacist. Later, under the pseudonym of supposedly Cherokee writer Forrest Carter, he wrote The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales (1972), a Western novel that was adapted into a 1976 film featuring Clint Eastwood that was added to the National Film Registry, and The Education of Little Tree (1976), a best-selling, award-winning book which was marketed as a memoir but which turned out to be fiction.
In 1976, following the success of The Rebel Outlaw and its film adaptation, The New York Times revealed Forrest Carter was actually Asa Carter. His background became national news again in 1991 after his purported memoir, The Education of Little Tree (1976), was re-issued in paperback, topping the Times paperback best-seller lists (both non-fiction and fiction) and winning the American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) award.
