Carter was Executive Director of the Washington Urban League in the mid-1950s, and later worked for the
National Urban League in New York. He entered government as a Deputy Assistant Secretary at the
U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare under the
Kennedy Administration. He later became an Assistant Director of the
Office of Economic Opportunity, and then became Assistant Secretary of HEW under the
Johnson Administration, becoming one of the highest-ranking African Americans in that department before leaving in 1968. He later became a Vice President at
Cornell University, and spent three years as Chancellor of the
Atlanta University Center, a consortium of
historically black colleges in downtown
Atlanta, before becoming President of UDC in 1977. After leaving UDC, Carter returned to practice law in Washington. He retired in the early 1990s as general counsel of the
United Way. Carter was a past board chairman of the
Children's Defense Fund, a nonprofit child advocacy organization, and served on the board of the
Kettering Foundation, a science, education and international and urban affairs research foundation. He was a trustee for
Georgetown University, Dartmouth College, the
Pension Rights Center and the
Aspen Institute. ==Personal==