A statue of Jimmy Carter outside the Georgia Capitol. (Photo by Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder)
Jimmy Carter was, first and foremost, a Southerner — the best kind of Southerner.
He represented the New South we never quite achieved after Lee surrendered at Appomattox but got occasional glimpses of — a South that was diverse, cognizant of its painful past, but also proud of its culture.
Though the South was — and is still — considered a bastion of rock-ribbed conservativism, evangelical zealotry, and racial bigotry, Carter was shaped by our long history of progressive leaders, people like anti-lynching campaigner Jessie Daniel Ames, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Terry Sanford, the pro-integration governor of North Carolina, and Floridians LeRoy Collins, who marched with King in Selma, and Claude “Red” Pepper, the only Florida congressman to vote in favor of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Carter had much in common with Florida governors Reubin Askew, Bob Graham, and Buddy MacKay: they all aimed to drag their states out of the Old South into the New.
As an Annapolis-trained nuclear engineer who lived his faith yet embraced difference and fought for equal justice, he defied the Southern yahoo stereotype.
When he ran for president in 1976, the press portrayed him as an unsophisticated farm boy, jeans-wearing and grits-eating, a rube whose wife offended against First Lady fashion by wearing what the The New York Times sniffily called an “old blue chiffon dress” from 1971 to the inaugural balls.
Carter’s disarming friendliness and jokey manner belied a formidable grasp of the issues (he shared this trait with Bob Graham); he was almost always the smartest guy in the room.
Twenty years before the first U.N. conference on climate change, Carter understood we were heading for a crisis and had solar panels installed on the White House.
His successor, deriding sustainable energy as a “joke,” removed them.
Uncomfortable realities
You don’t solve centuries of prejudice in a few decades, and you don’t fix greed and ignorance in four years: Most Americans didn’t then, and don’t now, want to give up their gas-guzzlers.
Too many Americans don’t want to contemplate uncomfortable realities, acknowledge the humanity of those who don’t look like them or love like them or vote like them, or move beyond their dream of an imagined past when men were men, women were ladies, and people of color knew their place.
Jimmy Carter, like many white Southerners, was the descendant of dirt farmers, Confederate soldiers, and plantation owners.
Also like many white Southerners, Jimmy Carter had Black kin, most notably Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, his third cousin: Gordy and Carter shared a great-grandfather in James Thomas Gordy, who had a child with an enslaved woman named Esther Johnson.
Unlike most white Southerners of his vintage would have been, Carter was relaxed about it.
Plenty of white folks have Black cousins, though these days the likes of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and top Trump adviser Stephen Miller are determined to play down systemic racism and define “American” as white.
Carter saw slavery as an abomination and Jim Crow a curse on the land, but recognized that the richness of American music, literature, language, and art grew out of its mix of the European, Native, and African.
He and Berry Gordy called each other “cuz.”
Progressive Christian
Carter may have been a peanut farmer, Navy man, and straight-arrow Baptist deacon famously ridiculed during his presidential campaign for confessing to committing “adultery many times in my heart,” but he was also a seriously cool guy.
He didn’t have a problem with gay marriage, pointing out that Jesus never said a word about homosexuality.
He promoted women’s rights, appointing twice as many minority and women jurists to the federal bench as all his White House predecessors combined.
Sixteen years before Hillary Clinton made it clear to freaked-out traditionalists that she was not the kind of First Lady who’d devote herself to giving teas in the Red Room, Jimmy Carter established a White House office for his wife Rosalynn: He regarded her as “an equal partner in everything.”
He quit the Southern Baptist Convention because it wouldn’t allow women to be ministers, explaining his decision in an essay titled “Losing My Religion for Equality.”
Invoking the Georgia band R.E.M. was not accidental.
Jimmy Carter loved musicians, hosting gospel concerts, jazz men (and women), country music stars, and R&B bands at the White House.
He was friends with Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, Jimmy Buffet, and the Allman Brothers, who raised money for his campaign and helped him win young people’s votes.
In Florida filmmaker Mary Wharton’s superb documentary, “Jimmy Carter, Rock & Roll President,” an amused Carter recounts how his son smoked weed with Willie Nelson on the White House roof.
Human rights
Carter’s four years in Washington and subsequent 45-year career working for human rights and free and fair elections across the world exemplify what our politics could have been like if we were less in thrall to big money, less fearful, and less selfish.
Despite the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Movement, the election of Barack Obama, and other encouraging but too often timid attempts to cure intolerance and racism, the vision of an America for all is still unrealized.
Carter tried: After he was elected governor of Georgia in 1970, he stood on the state capitol steps and declared, “The time for racial discrimination is over.”
“No poor, rural, weak, or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.”
There was applause, but outrage, too. Georgia was still the state of Lester Maddox, who was Carter’s predecessor as governor and also served lieutenant governor. Maddox famously refused entry to three Black seminary students trying to integrate his chicken restaurant, threatening them with a pickaxe handle.
Carter was not a saint, however: he was a politician. In 1970 he told Vernon Jordan, then director of the United Negro College Fund, “You won’t like my campaign, but you will like my administration.”
Carter courted the white rural vote, avoided making promises to Black people or talking about civil rights, and sought the endorsement of George Wallace.
But by the time he became president, Carter had ditched the politics of the Confederacy and tried his best to make America a leader in social justice, women’s rights, and anti-racism.
Grace
In the end, it didn’t work.
Although he negotiated the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, normalized ties with China, created the Departments of Energy and Education, and negotiated the return of the Panama Canal to Panama, vastly improving U.S. relations with Latin America, he stumbled over high energy prices, inflation, and the hostage crisis.
In 1980, he lost to the shiny, shallow Ronald Reagan who, in defiance of demonstrable reality, promised sunshine and rainbows.
The hostage crisis killed Carter’s re-election bid. Now we know that the Republicans, ever masters of dirty tricks, colluded with Iran to help engineer his election loss.
John Connally, Richard Nixon’s secretary of the treasury, Ben Barnes, a Republican politician from Texas, and others almost certainly cut a secret deal with Iran to hold those 53 Americans until after the election.
Carter left Washington with the same grace he entered it and went on to live a life of service, dedicating himself to building houses for the poor, eradicating diseases such as river blindness and guinea worm, and, as he put it, “waging peace.”
It’s painful to contrast the promise of his administration with where we are now: a convicted felon president-elect who’s been adjudicated to have committed sexual assault, determined not to build but destroy, threatening to dismantle the Department of Education, jail political opponents, strong-arm NATO allies, abandon the fight for freedom in Ukraine, roll back green energy policies, and somehow requisition the Panama Canal.
To think that Florida, once a progressive Southern state that helped propel Carter to the White House, has now turned its back on everything that Carter, Graham, Askew, Pepper, and Collins stood for.
America is walking backward into what looks like a dark future.
It’s sadly fitting that he, one of the best people in American politics, died just before the presidency falls into the hands of one of the worst.
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