In 1954, a 30-year-old Jimmy Carter got a knock on his door in tiny Plains, Georgia.
A year earlier, he had left the Navy to come home and take over the family farm and peanut warehouse businesses after his father died. That left him one of the most prominent men in Plains.
He found at the door a Baptist minister and the chief of police, who represented the local White Citizens’ Council, a racist group.
In two of his memoirs, Carter wrote that the men asked him to join. They told him he was the only white man in Plains who had not. Then they threatened to boycott the Carter business if he didn’t. In a final act of attempted persuasion, they offered to pay his initiation fee — $5.
“I’ve got $5,” Carter told them. “And I’d flush it down the toilet before I’d give it to you.”
The 39th president of the United States grew into a politician who shaped race relations. But before he did that, he was shaped by them, growing up in the Jim Crow South.
Credit: Jim Wilson
Credit: Jim Wilson
Two Worlds
Jimmy Carter’s parents — Earl and Lillian Carter — gave him two views to start with as a boy.
Earl was a peanut farmer and community store and farm warehouse owner who followed the rules of segregation. Earl Carter made African Americans go to the back door of his house to knock.
Still, though, he showed a sense of honesty in dealing with Black neighbors.
“My daddy would condemn severely, sometimes confront a white person who abused an African American or cheated them on a settlement,” Carter said to a 2018 class of Emory University students studying cold civil rights cases in Georgia.
Lillian, a nurse, was a fan of Black baseball player Jackie Robinson, delivered and nursed sick Black children in Plains and let those sharecroppers come in the front door.
“Imagine that milieu, where the father was back door and the mother was front door,” said Douglas Brinkley, who wrote the 1999 biography on Carter, “The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House.”
“That is where you see Carter as a transitional figure. He loved both of his parents and was part of both traditions.”
Then there were the other residents in Archery, the tiny community outside of Plains where the Carters lived. It was made up of two white families and about 25 Black ones.
In 2018, Carter told a class of Emory students that while his mother worked 20 hours a day as a nurse and his father toiled in the fields, “I was raised by African American women.”
In “Why Not the Best,” Carter said of Black childhood friends: “We hunted, fished, explored, worked and slept together. But other aspects of life were strictly segregated.”
On the last page of his book, “An Hour Before Daylight,” he lists the five people aside from his parents “who most deeply affected my early life.”
Three of them — Bishop William Decker Johnson, Rachel Clark and Willis Wright who worked on the Carter farm — were African Americans.
Andrew Young, one of Martin Luther King Jr.‘s closest aides during the civil rights movement, said he was unsure what to make of Carter when he met him while Young was running for Congress in 1970. In 1961, King, Ralph David Abernathy and William G. Anderson were arrested for civil rights work in Albany and transferred to jail in Sumter County where Carter was raised. Sheriff Fred D. Chappell was in charge.
King later said of him: “I had the displeasure of meeting the meanest man in the world.”
Young asked Carter when he met him if he knew Chappell.
“He said, ‘Yes, he is a good friend of mine,’” Young recalled.
Late in life, Young’s opinion was secured after years of knowing and working with Carter.
“Most white people grew up knowing Blacks as servants, but he grew up where everybody was God’s children, and that unusual upbringing sets him apart.”
Changing times and a changed man
Carter’s life span reached from the Jim Crow era through the civil rights movement to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, when he said he and Rosalynn were “pained by the tragic racial injustices and consequent backlash across our nation in recent weeks.”
But his start in politics was more circumspect, despite his later-in-life remembrances of Black childhood friends. Carter was elected to the Sumter County Board of Education in 1955 — a year after that knock on the door and a year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s order desegregating schools.
“It seems hard to believe now, but I was actually a member of the county school board for several months before it dawned on me that white children rode buses to their school and Black students still walked to theirs!” Carter wrote in his 1975 autobiography, “Why Not the Best.”
Change came slowly, but Carter began showing his mettle.
He was a state senator by 1965 when Warren Fortson, the Sumter County attorney, took it upon himself after several years of heated racial unrest in the county to set up a bi-racial committee to talk through problems. Fortson began getting menacing phone calls, and white clients left his private legal business. The women at the local Junior League refused to speak to his wife.
The county commission called a meeting to fire Fortson.
“Jimmy, against my pleading with him not to, appeared at the county commissioners’ hearing to throw me off,” Fortson told the New York Times in 1976. “He caught a lot of unshirted hell by that, and he spent a lot of time trying to patch up his business after that. They tried to boycott him.”
Still, Carter was an ambitious and pragmatic politician.
Running as a moderate and trying to avoid alienating the significant percentage of the white population that still opposed integration, he finished third in the 1966 Democratic primary for governor behind segregationist Lester Maddox.
Credit: Charles Pugh/AJC staff) 1965
Credit: Charles Pugh/AJC staff) 1965
In the 1970 election, Carter ran again and appealed to segregationists, even cozying up to outgoing Governor Maddox, who famously banned Black customers from his restaurant and waved a pick-axe handle around to scare them off. He rarely appeared before groups of Black voters and campaigned against busing as a means of integrating schools.
In a 2006 interview recorded by Young Harris College, fellow progressive Democrat Carl Sanders recalled the 1970 Democratic primary running against Carter.
“He took the position that I was now an Atlanta lawyer. And that I was a friend of Lyndon Johnson. And that I had something to do with integrating the public schools, and that those were not the things you wanted in a governor,” said Sanders. “He took the position that he believed in segregation, that George Wallace was his cousin, and the segregated type of operation in government was preferred over the kind that I stood for. He positioned himself as a South Georgia redneck.”
“He is a politician,” Brinkley said. “Politicians run to win.”
Carter won the primary and general election, but quickly turned to his progressive stance as he was sworn in.
“The time for racial discrimination is over,” he famously said in his 1971 inauguration speech, ushering in the “New South” movement.
Standing behind him was a stunned Maddox, who had been elected lieutenant governor. Three days later, Carter called Maddox into his office and warned him not to oppose his coming desegregation initiatives.
“My daddy whipped me and things like that, but he never talked to me that mean, that vicious,” Maddox later told Brinkley. “If I even opposed [Carter] on one issue, I went with him 99 times and missed him one, he was going to crush me.”
Carter increased the number of Black employees in Georgia’s government by 25%. He ordered a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. to be hung in the Georgia Capitol. Four months after his inaugural speech, Carter was on the cover of Time magazine under the banner headline: “Dixie Whistles a Different Tune.”
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
Credit: ccompton@ajc.com
When Carter won the 1976 presidential Democratic Primary, he appealed to and embraced Black voters and quoted Martin Luther King Jr. on the campaign trail. In the general election, he defeated incumbent Gerald Ford by securing Southern states except for Virginia, and winning 88% of the Black vote.
Carter brought more people of color and women into government positions than had any previous president. They included HUD Secretary Patricia Harris, the first Black woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, and he asked Young to be the United States Ambassador to the United Nations.
Carter appointed Black judges to the federal bench, and increased access to credit and economic programs for poor, rural Blacks. He launched the Black College Initiative to give historic Black colleges and universities more federal support.
When he returned to Plains after the White House, he quit his Baptist church that had voted to not allow a Black man to become a member and found a new church.
Much of his post-presidential work focused on poor places around the world populated with Black and brown people — working on health, peace, food security and good government. That work led to his 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.
Well into his 90s, Carter was still pushing.
After Barack Obama was elected as America’s first Black president he said: “Racism inclination still exists. And I think it’s bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It’s an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply.”
Later he said Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign “tapped a waiting reservoir there of inherent racism.”
And he foresaw the rise of Black Lives Matter in 2016, knowing the work of integration and fairness was not over. He told The Atlantic magazine, “Our country is waking up now to the fact that we still have a long way to go in winning a battle that we thought was over in the 1970s or ’60s.”
About the Author
