On September 14, 2011, former President Jimmy Carter was interviewed by the “President’s Gatekeepers” project at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia.
David Hume Kennerley | Archive Photo | Getty Images
Jimmy Carter’s long public farewell began in Georgia on Saturday as the 39th U.S. president’s casket was draped in a flag, tracing his path from the Depression-era South and family farming business to American political power The pinnacle and a long trajectory as a global humanitarian over the decades.
The chapters run through the beginning of a six-day state funeral designed to blend personalized commemoration with the grandeur of the former president. Carter, the oldest executive in the United States, died on December 29 at the age of 100.
“He was a wonderful man,” his son, James Earl “Chip” Carter III, told mourners at the Carter Center late Saturday afternoon. An amazing woman supports, sustains and comforts people.
“It’s amazing how much you can cram into a hundred years,” said grandson Jason Carter, who now chairs the center’s board of trustees.
Carter’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren accompanied their patriarch as his hearse rolled through his hometown of Plains that first Saturday. Not much bigger. The motorcade continued on to Atlanta, stopping in front of the Georgia Capitol, where Carter had served as a state senator and reformist governor.
Finally, he made one last visit to the Carter Presidential Center, which houses the Presidential Library and the Carter Center, where he advocated for public health, democracy, and human rights after his time in the White House, setting a new standard for what former presidents can do after they bend.
“His spirit fills this place,” Jason Carter said at the conference, which included some of the center’s 3,000 employees around the world. “You carry on the vibrant legacy of my grandfather’s life’s work,” he added.
On December 30, 2024, in Washington, the United States, after the death of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, the flag of the U.S. Capitol in the distance was flown at half-mast, and the flag of the Washington Monument on the National Mall was flown at half-mast.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
Pallbearers Saturday came from the Secret Service, which has protected the Carters for nearly half a century, and a military honor guard that included Navy servicemen, the only U.S. Naval Academy graduates to enter the Oval Office. The military band played “Hail to the Chief” and the hymn “Be Thou My Vision” for the commander-in-chief, who was also a devout Baptist.
His longtime personal pastor, the Rev. Tony Loudon, remembers not a president but the frail man who spent the past 22 months in hospice “wrapped in a blanket” with psalms written on it 23 articles.
Chip Carter recalled the “boss” he had to make an appointment to see in the Oval Office, but was also a father who spent the entire Christmas break studying Latin and teaching his eighth-grade son, who was failing a test. Carter Jr. said that when he took the test again, he got excellent results. “I owe it to my dad for spending that time with me.”
Jimmy Carter will be laid to rest at the Carter Presidential Center from 7 p.m. Saturday to 6 a.m. Tuesday, where tributes will be available to the public throughout the day. State services will continue in Washington and conclude with a funeral service Thursday at Washington National Cathedral before returning to Plains. There, the former president will be buried next to his wife of 77 years, near the home they built before his first run for the state Senate in 1962.
The Carter family lived in Plains nearly all of their lives, except for a stint in the Navy, when he spent four years in the Governor’s Mansion and four years in the White House. Mourners lined the main street as his hearse rolled through the town, some carrying flowers and pins bearing the former president’s face and his signature smile.
“We wanted to pay our respects,” said 12-year-old Will Porter Shelbrock, who was born more than three decades after Carter left the White House in 1981.
Porter Shelbrock and her 66-year-old grandmother, Susan Cone, are from Gainesville, Florida. Talking about global warming had become part of everyday political conversation before the crisis.
Willie Browner, 75, described Carter as coming from a bygone era of American politics.
“This guy was thinking about more than himself,” said Bronner, who grew up in the town of Parrott, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) from Plains. Bronner said it “means a lot” to have a president from a small Southern town like his – something he fears is unlikely to happen again.
In fact, Carter helped plan his own funeral to emphasize that his extraordinary rise to the world stage was because of — not despite — his deep rural roots.
The motorcade passed through several neighborhoods in Plains, past where the Carter family ran the family peanut warehouse and the small house where his nurse mother delivered the future first lady in 1927. Presidential Campaign Headquarters – A crude project that relies on public funding and pales in comparison to the multibillion-dollar U.S. presidential campaigns of the 21st century.
Visitors to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery gaze at the Norman Rockwell portrait of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, draped in black mourning, in the Oval Office of the White House on December 30, 2024 in Washington, DC.
Roberto Schmidt | AFP | Getty Images
Dozens of National Park Service rangers lined up in front of his home at Carter’s farm, where there was no running water or electricity when Carter was a child. The old farm bell rang 39 times to commemorate Carter’s term as the 39th president.
The tennis court built for the family by Carter’s father, James Earl Carter Sr., remains next to the house, a tribute to the blend of privilege and hard country life that defined the future president. growth experience. Carter farmed the land during the Great Depression, but the land was owned by Carter Sr., who employed surrounding black sharecroppers during the Jim Crow segregation era.
Carter has written and spoken extensively about those formative years and how the abject poverty and institutional racism he saw shaped his government policies and human rights work.
Former Georgia congressman Calvin Smyer honored that legacy at the state Capitol on Saturday. Smyer, who is black, said Carter’s repudiation of segregation allowed blacks to exercise power in Georgia.
“We stand on the shoulders of brave men like Jimmy Carter,” Smyer said. “What he did shocked and shook the political foundation of Georgia. We are better off because of it.”
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