Jimmy Carter was first and foremost a southerner – the best kind of southerner.
He represented the New South that we never quite achieved after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, but was seen from time to time – a South that was diverse, aware of its painful past, but also proud of its culture.
Although the South was – and still is – considered a bastion of ribald conservatism, evangelical bigotry, and racist bigotry, Carter was shaped by our long history of progressive leaders, people like anti-lynching activists Jessie Daniel AmesReverend Martin Luther King Jr., Terry Sanford, the pro-integration governor of North Carolina, and the people of Florida LeRoy Collinswho marched with King in Selma, and Claude “Red” Pepper, the only Florida congressman to vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Carter had a lot in common with Florida governors Reubin Askew, Bob Graham and Buddy MacKay: all sought to drag their states from the Old South to the New.
As an Annapolis-trained nuclear engineer who lived his faith while accepting difference and fighting for equal justice, he defied the Southern Yahoo stereotype.
When he ran for president in 1976, the press portrayed him as a elementary, jeans-wearing, grits-eating, ruby farm boy whose wife insulted the First Lady’s fashion by wearing what New York Times from 1971 until the inaugural balls, she sniffled and called it “the old blue chiffon dress.”
Carter’s disarming kindness and joking manner belied his incredible knowledge of the issues (a trait he shared with Bob Graham); he was almost always the smartest guy in the room.
Twenty years before the first UN climate change conference, Carter realized that we were headed for a crisis and had solar panels installed on the White House.
His successor, deriding sustainable energy as “joke“, I deleted them.
Inconvenient 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 want to, abandon their gas guzzlers.
Too many Americans are unwilling to contemplate uncomfortable realities, to acknowledge the humanity of those who don’t look like them, who don’t love like them, who don’t vote like them, or who are unwilling to move beyond their dream of an imagined past when men were men and women were women, and people of color knew their place.
Jimmy Carter, like many white Southerners, was descended from farmers, Confederate soldiers, and plantation owners.
Like many white southerners, Jimmy Carter had black relatives, most notably the founder of Motown Records Berry Gordyhis 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 age, Carter was relaxed.
Many white people have black cousins, although currently Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and top Trump adviser Stephen Miller are determined to downplay systemic racism and define “American” as white.
Carter saw slavery as an abomination and Jim Crow as a curse on the land, but he recognized that the richness of American music, literature, language, and art arose from a mixture of European, indigenous, and African music.
He and Berry Gordy called each other “bo”.
Progressive Christian
Carter may have been a peanut farmer, Navy man and Baptist deacon who was ridiculed during his presidential campaign for admitting to committing “adultery many times in my heart,” but he was also a really nice guy.
He had no problem with gay marriage, pointing out that Jesus never mentioned a word about homosexuality.
He got promoted women’s rightsappointing twice as many minority and women’s lawyers to the federal bench as all of his White House predecessors combined.
Sixteen years before Hillary Clinton made it clear to terrified traditionalists that she was not the type of First Lady who would devote herself to serving tea in the Red Room, Jimmy Carter set up a White House office for his wife, Rosalynn: He considered her as “an equal partner in everything.”
He toresign the Southern Baptist Convention because it did not allow women to serve as clergy, explaining their decision in an essay titled “The Loss of Religion for Equality.”
The mention of the Georgian band REM was not accidental.
Jimmy Carter loved musicians, organizing gospel concerts, jazzmen (and women), country stars and R&B bands at the White House.
He became 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 the votes of adolescent people.
An excellent film by director Mary Wharton from Florida documentary“Jimmy Carter, the president of rock and roll” – an amused Carter tells how his son smoked pot with Willie Nelson on the roof of the White House.
Human rights
Carter’s four years in Washington and his subsequent 45-year career working for human rights and free and fair elections around the world are an example of what our politics could look like if we were less enslaved to large 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 remains unrealized.
Carter tried: After being elected governor of Georgia in 1970, he stood on the steps of the state capitol and declared, “The time has come for racial discrimination.” over“
“No poor, rural, weak or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of opportunities for education, work or simple justice.”
There was applause, but also outrage. Georgia was still the state of Lester Maddox, who had been Carter’s predecessor as governor and also served as lieutenant governor. Maddox became famed for denying entry to three black seminary students who were trying to integrate his chicken restaurant, threatening them with a pickaxe handle.
But Carter was no saint: he was a politician. In 1970, he told Vernon Jordan, then director of the United Negro College Fund, “You won’t like my campaignbut you will like my administration.
Carter courted rural whites, avoided making promises to blacks and talking about civil rights, and sought support George Wallace.
But before he became president, Carter abandoned Confederate politics and did everything in his power to make America a leader in social justice, women’s rights and anti-racism.
Grace
Ultimately it didn’t work.
Although he negotiated the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, normalized relations with China, created the Departments of Energy and Education, and negotiated the return of the Panama Canal to Panama, greatly improving U.S. relations with Latin America, he stumbled over high energy prices, inflation, and the hostage crisis.
In 1980, he lost to shiny, shallow Ronald Reagan, who, contrary to demonstrable reality, promised sunshine and rainbows.
The hostage crisis killed Carter’s re-election bid. We now know that Republicans, always masters of dirty tricks, colluded with Iran to lend a hand engineer its election defeat.
John Connally, Richard Nixon’s treasury secretary, Ben Barnes, a Republican politician from Texas, and others almost certainly cut off secret agreement with Iran to hold these 53 Americans until the elections.
Carter left Washington with the same grace with which he entered it, and continued a life of service, devoting himself to building homes for the impoverished, elimination diseases such as river blindness and guinea worm, and, as he put it, “peacekeeping.”
It is painful to compare the promises of his administration with the situation we now find ourselves in: a convicted felon president-elect who has been found guilty of sexual assault, determined not to build but to destroy, the threatened dissolution of the Department of Education, the jailing of political opponents, the powerful – arm NATO allies, abandon the freedom fight in Ukraine, roll back green energy policies, and somehow commandeer Panama Canal.
To think that Florida, once a progressive southern state, helped propel Carter to the White House, he now turned his back on everything Carter, Graham, Askew, Pepper and Collins stood for.
America is retreating into what looks like a murky future.
It’s gloomy that he, one of the best men in American politics, died just before the presidency fell to one of the worst.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. If you have any questions, please contact editor Michael Moline: [email protected].
