Trevor Carter (9 October 1930 – March 2008) was a British communist party leader, educator, black civil rights activist, and co-founder of the Caribbean Teachers Association. He served as the head of equal opportunities for the Inner London Education Authority. He co-authored the 1986 book Shattering Illusions: West Indians in British Politics.

Writers on British socialist movements have described Carter as "one of the Communist Party of Great Britain's (CPGB) most important black members" from the mid-1950s until 1991. Carter was a communist activist, and a member of the CPGB from his arrival in Britain in 1954 until the party was dissolved in 1991. Cheddi Jagan invited Carter to British Guiana to work in education.

Carter was the stage manager of the first British-Caribbean Carnival, held in St Pancras Town Hall, and later a Trustee of the Notting Hill Carnival Trust. Together his cousin Claudia Jones, and wife, the EastEnders actress Corinne Skinner-Carter, they helped establish the second-largest annual carnival in the world, London's Notting Hill Carnival.

Trevor Clarence Carter was born in Woodbrook, Port of Spain, in the British colony of Trinidad, on 9 October 1930, the eldest of 12 children of housewife Elene Carter, and her husband, cabinet maker Clarence Carter. His views and political beliefs were heavily influenced by some of his teachers who were Marxists, and by his father who was a trade unionist, the combination of which made a strong impression on Carter. Sometime during his childhood, he met a girl called Corinne, whom he married later in life.

At the age of 14, Carter left school and worked as a mess boy on a merchant ship; during this time he travelled to New Orleans where he observed segregation. Carter's "experiences in New Orleans at the height of racial segregation engendered a lifelong battle to improve race relations" according to Carter's obituary, and made him vow to never live in the United States according to Graham Stevenson, a British trade union leader.

After travelling through various parts of the U.S., Carter moved to Britain to study architecture at Regent Street Polytechnic. In 1954 he arrived in London as a member of the Windrush generation. According to Paul Okojie of Manchester Polytechnic in a 1987 book review published in Race & Class, Carter described London during that period in his 1986 book, Shattering Illusions: West Indians in British Politics as "traumatic", and a place "which rejected, insulted, devalued and discriminated against" West Indians, where they "encountered humiliation and had to learn to survive within a system of economic, political and cultural subordination", writing that the work they could find was "invariably unskilled manual work" with long hours for little pay.

In Britain, Carter lived for several years with fellow Caribbean communist activist Billy Strachan, alongside Strachan's family. Carter described Strachan as his mentor. Both Strachan and Carter would play a small role in assisting Claudia Jones in creating the West Indian Gazette (1958–1965). Later in life, Carter recalled the Strachan family fondly, saying that he felt "a true affection in the Strachan family".

Soon after arriving in Britain, Carter joined the Young Communist League (YCL), and later, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He was also active in the Caribbean Labor Congress (CLC), which historian Bill Schwarz suggests operated independently of the Communist Party, despite being proscribed by the Labour Party and TUC as a "Communist front".