William Hodding Carter II was an American journalist who founded the Delta Star in Greenville, Mississippi and merged it into the Delta Democrat-Times, which he edited until failing eyesight led him to hand it to his son, Hodding Carter III, in 1966. He won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for pieces attacking racial intolerance, including the editorial “Go for Broke” defending Japanese American servicemen. Where Main Street Meets the River (1953) is his memoir of that newspaper career — and the book that put “roots and wings” into general circulation, though Carter carefully credited the words to someone else.