'Just a country boy with ethics'.

In Tabor City, N.C., weekly newspaper editor Horace Carter is still puzzled as to why the Ku Klux Klan did not assassinate him in the early 1950s. The Klan threatened him many times.

Scribbled messages were left under the windshield wipers of his car. He received telephone calls in the night from people who refused to identify themselves -- people with voices strained by their anger -- who told him to quit writing attacks on the Klan.

His worried friends told him he was playing with fire, and his wife, the late Lucile Carter, was frightened most of the time from the summer of 1950 on into 1953.

Horace Carter refused to cower. He fought the Klan with a series of front-page editorials printed in large type in his weekly Tabor Tribune.

Nobody else in or around Tabor City spoke out against the secretive KKK, which reputedly had 5,000 local members, including law enforcement officers. People either agreed with the Klan or were too scared to say anything. Some figured that one morning the young editor's bloody body would be found on a country road.

Instead, in 1953, his editorials against the Klan won his newspaper the Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service. A Raleigh newspaper editor had nominated the Tabor Tribune for the prize even though no weekly newspaper had ever won one.

Suddenly Carter was bulletproof. Klansmen knew they would make national news and draw too much attention to themselves if they killed the winner of a Pulitzer Prize. Before then, maybe not.

I wanted to know why Carter wrote those editorials. So one day in August I stopped unannounced in Tabor City and asked him.

"I am just by nature against vigilantes who discriminate against people because of race or religion," he said.

Later in our conversation, he said, "If you write something about me, don't make me out to be a big shot. I'm not. I'm just a country boy with ethics."

At 80, Carter still works at the newspaper he started in 1946. He writes the editorials, some of the news stories, and an outdoor column for what is now the Tabor-Loris Tribune. Carter told me the 4,500-circulation weekly is better than ever because he and the two other staff members fill the paper each week with local news and opinion. Advertising revenues are strong, he said, because businesses realize that people spend time with a paper that lets them know what's going on.

As we talked, I noticed copies of a book stacked on Carter's desk. I was surprised to find out that it was his recently published autobiography, Only in America: The Life and Times of an American Newspaper Editor. (The hardcover book is printed by his own company, the Atlantic Corporation, P.O. Box 67, Tabor City, N.C., 28463, and sells for $21.95.)

Carter's book -- the 25th he has written and published - includes the text of his anti-Klan editorials.

The first of those editorials appeared a few days after robed, masked Klansmen shocked Saturday night shoppers in Tabor City by slowly rolling through town in a 29-car motorcade. Carter did not know the Klan even existed; he thought it had withered and died in the days following Reconstruction.

The Klan's apparent purpose that night was to intimidate. Within days, however, the local KKK launched a campaign of terror aimed at blacks, Jews, Catholics, and any white person the Klan deemed guilty of immoral behavior. Victims were abducted, hauled off into one of many local swamps, and beaten. Bullwhips were used. Ears were cut off.

In his book, Carter writes that he was unable to get to sleep the night the Klan drove through Tabor City.

"My duty as the only newspaperman in Tabor City stared me squarely in the face. I could not compromise my conscience. I must fight the Klansmen with all the power that my tiny press could muster. That meant that I, too, would be the victim of their wrath. I was no hero, but the die was cast and I would have to respond."

When the next issue of the Tabor Tribune came out the following Wednesday, a front-page editorial pleaded with people not to become involved with "this infamous band of vigilantes" because they "will bring violence, despair, lawlessness, and tragedy if they succeed in organizing and survive.

Not until almost three years later did the local. KKK organization break up. The U.S. Justice Department became involved when a victim was abducted in North Carolina and taken across the state line into South Carolina and beaten. The party was over for the home-grown terrorists.

During our conversation, Carter told me about the day the local grand dragon, Thomas Hamilton, paid him a visit at the Tribune office and told him to quit writing "junk" or else the Klan would stage an economic boycott against every business that advertised in the newspaper.

"That scared me more than anything," Carter said.

In his autobiography, Carter recalls what he told the grand dragon that day: "I can't last long without advertisers. I need every two-dollar subscriber I can find. But no amount of pressure you put on me will stop me from writing how I feel about the Klan as long as I have money to print another paper."

There was no boycott.

The grand dragon blinked.