ATLANTA (AP) — Young Jimmy Carter and his friends were walking across a pasture after a day’s farm labor during the Great Depression. As they came to a gate, his companions stood aside and let Carter enter first.
This was no act of kindness or intuitive deference to a future U.S. president. The teens stopped because they were Black, and James Earl Carter Jr. was white, a 14-year-old whose father owned the Georgia land they all worked.
After years of playing and working as equals, his friends’ silent statement opened Carter’s eyes.
“We only saw it vaguely then, but we were transformed at the place,” Carter wrote in a poetry collection published years after his presidency. “A silent line was drawn between friend and friend, race and race.”
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Carter, who died Dec. 29 at the age of 100, spent his life intertwined with America’s and the world’s enduring legacy of slavery. His approach revealed a dualism in Carter that, at least earlier in life, pitted his political ambitions against the idealism of his religious and social values.
He was a governor, president and humanitarian who climbed political ladders with calculated moderation, while still using his powerful platforms to break down racial barriers and advance human rights.
Carter “sometimes juggled the line to get into office,” said Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated two years before Carter’s election as Georgia governor. But he was “a real friend to the Black community,” she said, and, once elected, “did things that most elected officials from the South just didn’t dare do.”
Before his public career, Carter and his wife Rosalynn, who died in November 2023, were called “n—– lovers” because of stands they took as private citizens. Yet in politics, he sometimes found himself cast an Old Confederacy racist, and he carefully managed relationships with erstwhile segregationists like Alabama Gov. George Wallace.
“Jimmy Carter had as strong a rural, south-Georgia accent as anybody I know,” recalled Andrew Young, a King aide
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