Hodding Carter III

Hodding Carter III, a crusading Mississippi newspaperman who championed civil rights for Black Americans in the 1960s and who, as a Carter administration official, was the nation’s prime source of information on the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 and 1980, died on Thursday May 11 2023 n Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 88. Hodding Carter was the University Professor of Leadership and Public Policy. He is chair of the University of North Carolina Press Development Council, a member of the Faculty’s Honorary Degrees Committee, a member of the California Performing Arts Advisory Committee, a member of the Thomas W. Lambeth Lecture Committee, and is involved in several Center for the Study of the American South projects and programs. Prior to joining the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. Carter was president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, where he worked with former UNC System President Bill Friday ’48 (LLB), who was chair of the foundation’s commission on intercollegiate athletics. Dr. Carter also worked for about 18 years as a reporter and editor for the Delta Democrat-Times of Greenville, Miss., which was owned by his father. Ferrel Guillory described them as “crusading Southern journalists.” As an editorialist, Carter strongly promoted the presidential candidacy of Terry Sanford ’39. He later worked on the presidential campaigns of Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter. Hodding Carter is perhaps best remembered as the spokesman for the U.S. State Department during the Iran hostage crisis in the late 1970s. Dr. Carter’s wife, Patt Derian, also worked in the Carter administration’s human rights initiatives in other countries. Dr. Carter later was a correspondent for the PBS Frontline documentary series and wrote as a contributor for major U.S. newspapers. He is a four-time Emmy winner and recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Award for broadcast journalism. 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 Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau and at The Chicago Sun-Times. In addition to his daughter Catherine, he is survived by his wife; three other children, Hodding IV, Finn Carter and Margaret Carter Joseph; his stepchildren, Mike, Craig and Brooke Derian; a brother, Philip; and 12 grandchildren.