I must remark on Jimmy Carter’s amazing life. He is a person I grew to admire immensely. While he is not rated highly among U.S. Presidents, he might have been the best former President.
However, I did not vote for Jimmy Carter in 1976, as I could not support a presidential candidate who openly opposed two of the most prominent issues of African Americans at the time – integrated housing and full employment.
Carter succeeded Lester Maddox as Governor of Georgia. The day after the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 outlawing racial segregation, three black seminary students entered Maddox’s restaurant. Maddox chased them away with a gun and distributed some of his ever-ready ax handles to customers who helped him chase the students away. Maddox, of course, rode his well-publicized illegal anti-integration activity to the Georgia governor’s mansion.
Incredibly, a few years later, during his first presidential campaign, Carter expressed his support for segregated neighborhoods, “I have nothing against a community that is… trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods.” He went further under questioning, that if he won the presidency, “I’m not going to use the Federal Government’s authority deliberately to circumvent the natural inclination of people to live in ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods.”
In 1975, the national unemployment rate for blacks was 12.4 percent. In 1976, a bill pushing for full employment (meaning an unemployment rate of 3%) was floating around Congress, sponsored by Senator Hubert Humphrey and Representative Gus Hawkins, a black congressman from California. Carter did not support this bill until 1978 when it had become considerably weaker.
Carter appeared to run “against Washington (the Congressional leaders, who were Democrats).” Unfortunately, he also seemed to govern that way when he might have accomplished more with more collaboration with Democratic Leaders.
In his presidential campaign, Carter enlisted the aid and support of Coretta Scott King and Andrew Young in a political manner that Martin Luther King might not have approved of. Many blacks thought Carter had a relationship with Martin Luther King while he was alive, but he did not. They never met.
Of course, Carter did appoint a record number of blacks to high-level government positions. But it was in his post-presidency that Carter shined.
My minister nephew says I witnessed Carter’s “development in Grace.”
After Carter’s presidential term ended, he established the Carter Center to promote and expand human rights, which led to his receiving a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his work in this area. He traveled extensively to conduct peace negotiations, monitor elections, and eradicate infectious diseases. Carter was a key figure in the nonprofit housing organization Habitat for Humanity.
Jimmy Carter led the global effort to eradicate the Guinea worm disease and is credited with nearly eliminating it. On my first trip to Africa, about 25 years ago, we encountered people from the Carter Center in various airports in Ethiopia. Ethiopia was one of the African countries suffering from the Guinea worm. We never determined whether this was their focus, whether it was agriculture assistance or both.
I learned two years ago that Jimmy Carter was a hero long before he became governor or President. As a graduate of the Naval Academy with a degree in nuclear engineering, he played a key role in repairing one of North America’s early nuclear reactor disasters.
He was a young Navy officer in the nation’s new nuclear-powered submarine program in 1952 when a Canadian experimental reactor at Chalk River Laboratories near Ottawa overheated, partially melting fuel rods. Then, explosions damaged the reactor, ruining its core.
Carter was ordered to lead a U.S. maintenance crew that joined other American and Canadian service personnel to assist in the shutdown of the reactor. The painstaking process required each team member to put on protective gear and be lowered individually into the reactor for a maximum of 90 seconds at a time, limiting their exposure to radioactivity while they disassembled the crippled reactor. When Carter was lowered in, his job was to turn a single screw. During and after his presidency, Carter said that his experience at Chalk River had shaped his views on atomic energy and led him to cease the development of a neutron bomb.
Thus, a peacemaker was born.
