Former President/CEO – The Knight Foundation
Hodding Carter III was a journalist who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs under President Jimmy Carter.
As a Mississippi newspaperman, he championed civil rights for Black Americans in the 1960s. As a Carter administration official, he was the nation’s prime source of information on the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 and 1980.
Hodding Carter III was president and CEO of the Knight Foundation from February 1998 until July 2005. Under his leadership, the Knight Foundation made $15 million in grants to further freedom-of-information projects and initiatives.
Carter’s father was a newspaper publisher and editor in the South, whose editorials on racial and religious tolerance for the family-owned Greenville, Mississippi Delta Democrat-Times won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946. Born in New Orleans and raised in Greenville, Hodding Carter III graduated summa cum laude in with a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University. After serving in the military, he returned to Greenville and spent nearly 18 years as reporter/editorial writer, managing editor, and editor and associate publisher of the Delta Democrat-Times.