R.I.P.: Horace Carter, who shared first Pulitzer Prize for weekly newspapers, dies at 88

UPDATE: Bruce Weber of The New York Times has a nice obituary.

Horace Carter of Tabor City, N.C., publisher of the first weekly newspaper to win a Pulitzer Prize, was buried today. He died Wednesday at 88, after suffering a heart attack last week.

The Pulitzer went to the Tabor City Tribune, now the Tabor-Loris Tribune, and The News Reporter in Whiteville, for a "four-year crusade against the Ku Klux Klan that saw 254 Klansmen convicted and 62 sent to the penitentiary or fined," the Fayetteville Observer said in a staff report.

"He was an inspiration to many, and friend to everyone he met, and a legend in community journalism for over 50 years. His commitment to social justice, God and country, his family and friends never wavered regardless of the challenge," said his son, Rusty Carter, president of the family's Atlantic Corp. His father also founded The Loris Sentinel and The Myrtle Beach Sun, now The Sun News. "He eventually sold off those holdings. and began a second writing career," writing 22 books and more than 2,000 magazine articles, "mostly relating to fishing and the outdoors, two of his passions," the Observer reported.

Before and after today's funeral, Carter's friends gathered at the office of his paper, which was fitting, wrote Steve Rondinaro of WWAY-TV in Wilmington. "Horace Carter was a small town giant of journalism," Rondinaro wrote. "He was risking his business and his life to expose the ugliness of some his own neighbors," and "stood tall in the face of intense pressure [and] acted on principle rather than self-interest." (Read more) For more on Carter, from the Carter-Klan Documentary Project, click here.