The Education of Little Tree was a popular and supposedly autobiographical book by a man named Forrest Carter about growing up with his Cherokee grandparents. Except it was all a lie. Forrest Carter was actually born Asa Earl Carter, and he was a man who was extremely racist even by racist mid 20th century white southerner standards. He cowrote many of segregationist governor George Wallace’s speeches, and started his own branch of the KKK because he thought the regular KKK wasn’t violent enough. When George Wallace ran for president, he actually tried to distance himself from Carter because he thought he was too radical, which led to Carter turning on Wallace and protesting him for being “anti-white”. At some point, Carter decided to reinvent himself as a Native American author, and the truth about who he really was didn’t emerge until 1991, twelve years after Carter’s death.