Few have afterlife in flesh and blood like Jimmy Carter. But the former United States president who soared to a century before bowing to the cemetery, has been called many names. President, senator, governor, nuclear engineer, poet, author, farmer, fly fisherman, naval officer, Nobel Laureate. No wonder at 90, he wrote a moving but simple memoir, A full life. But what he preferred, above all else, was to be called a Christian.
He was my first introduction to the concept of the American president. I was a student when he visited Nigeria and hosted by the Owu Chief, who was the military head of state, Olusegun Obasanjo. And it was on his lips I first heard the word racism. He was one of the big men in history who would walk beside you without airs, as he did when he sat on a technology conference I attended in Atlanta. He never stained his soul with success.
Few know that his father loved whites and blacks to be apart but his mother wanted the exact opposite. He loved his father, but inherited his mother, who visited, ate with and accepted blacks in their home, against his father’s protests. So, Carter grew up racially blind in his deep south village known as Plains, Georgia. His best friends were black, and he preferred the warmth and incandescence of black worship to the cold pieties of his race. He even spoke fluent black accent and played translator between the races.
It was when he turned 14 that he lost his racial innocence when he and his two black friends walked to a pasture gate on their farm, and they opened the gate and stepped back to allow him step into the pasture ahead of them. The naïve Jimmy thought it was a trap and the guys had planted a tripwire so he could fall as part of their games.
But it was dead serious. What his friends, Johnny and A.D., did was an act of racial deference. Jim Crow had crept into an idyllic bond, and deflowered him forever. He was forced to see black and exalt white, and he fought the latter all his life. He concluded a poem on that moment of knowing with the following words: “We only saw it vaguely then, /but we were transformed at that place./ A silent line was drawn/ between friend and friend, race and race.”
His story of those bucolic years is invoked with grace and detail in his boyhood memoirs, A Hour Before Daylight, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. So when we saw him in Nigeria, or in Ethiopia, or somewhere in the recesses of malaria-infested dark hole of human habitation, trace it to the times of epiphany in Plains, Georgia.
When Kemi Badenoch lost her balance to racial capitulation, she was benefitting from what psychologists call “white guilt.” I saw that a lot when I lived in the United States. It is not necessarily a bad thing. It is the sort of line that peppers phrases like, “I was not responsible for what my ancestors did to blacks”, “it was a time of injustice,” etc. It is the sort of logic that justifies Jefferson and Washington, who called for liberty but had slaves. Jefferson even had a child with a black girl known as Sally Hemings. Or the argument that Abraham Lincoln liberated slaves though he did not believe in equality. Some analysts say they were products of their times.
Was Carter powered by white guilt? Maybe? There is nothing wrong with that. I cannot forget the day I just started a programme with the prestigious Rocky Mountain News, and I waited at the gate for a cab to take me home. A family car stopped by and they – father, wife, son and daughter – wanted to give me a ride home. It was raining. I turned it down, because I did not want to bother them. As they left, their daughter kept looking back, her face weighted with pain. I regretted it later when I knew they wanted to help a black man, wet in his white shirt and black tie.
If we have the sort of white guilt of Jimmy Carter, the world would tackle the bear of hate to a prostrate floor.
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It is the power of childhood, and some Nigerians who grew up loving other ethnic groups without emotional encumbrances demonstrate that parents pay a price for turning their children to either tribal or religious bigots, or lovers of their neighbours. We see that from writers, politicians, governors and presidents.
We must know that Carter loved humans hence has saved millions of Nigerians from river blindness, guinea worm, trachoma, malaria. His Carter Centre is labouring on, and it is the debt we owe that great man that even in death, he is still doing good.
The other quality is his integrity, and some might call him naïve. Yes, he was, but there is good naïve and bad naïve. His was good. He did not, like Jonathan, make a flaky monument out of his humble background when he ran for president. He did not tell Americans, in false humility like Goodluck Jonathan, that he had no shoes as a boy. Carter had no electricity or pipe-borne water. As he put in his memoirs, he walked “barefoot in mud and manure”. He was the first U.S. president to be born in a hospital.
When he ran for the world’s most powerful office, his fellow countrymen wondered, “Jimmy who?.” His first try at office was as a state senator and it was like an election in Nigeria when his opponents who hated his racial empathies did what might have happened in Nigeria. Dead people voted, ballot boxes were stuffed, and the numbers skewed. He challenged the process. Talk about naïve. He prevailed. His book, Turning Point, unveils the experience. When he ran for governor, someone helped him with a free plane ride all over the state. After he won, Carter asked him what he wanted from him. The fellow said he should say in his inaugural address the following, “The time for racial discrimination is over.” And Carter obliged.
He had failed in his first guber try. He filled his days as an evangelical, travelling from city to city, and from house to house. After his term as governor, and he won a place in the White House, his tour has often been diminished by historians and journalists, perhaps because the American darling, Ronald Reagan, beat him. I was particularly unhappy with a piece by Time magazine’s essayist Lance Morrow, who painted the Carter years as gloomy and weak, and so Americans “buried him in a landslide.”
The same view prevailed of Harry S. Truman, who succeeded Franklyn Roosevelt. It was in the early 2000s, kudos to historian David McCollough, that historians began to elevate him from good to near-great as president. I think people are revising their views of the Plains man. For a man who gave us Camp David and ended a generation of belligerence between Israel and Egypt. A man who hired more women and blacks into office, including in the judiciary, than all presidents before him combined. The man who gave us FEMA before many heard the phrase melting snow, or global warming. The man who set up the departments of education and energy, and installed the first solar panel in the White House. He was an evangelical, but he was prophet more for his acts than his utterance. His utterances were in his deeds.
The reason he gets that lower rating is because he had better ratings after office. I am sure if he was asked if he wanted to be a great man instead of a great president, he would choose the former. Yet, what many writers and pundits were not brave to accept is that he was a great man who became a president. Not many can say same of Reagan, who walked to Mississippi in the heat of a racial killing and declared, “I believe in state’s rights.” That is a code for racism.
Another reason was the hostage crisis when Iran held Americans for 444 days, and his rescue attempt failed. The Ayatollah released them to Reagan to spite Carter. Imagine that killing of Osama has not sainted Obama but the hostage crisis has bedeviled Carter!
In his books, especially A Full Life and An Hour Before daylight, he made a point about race in America. He showed that one of the reasons for deep resentment between blacks and whites was rooted in the Civil War. The whites who fought to retain racism were defeated, and so they saw themselves as a conquered people. Then the blacks, who were their wares were now the liberated. It gave them moral inferiority and blacks, in a deep and wounded sense, became emblems of their moral failures. It generated much hate, and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, and what became known as the lost cause, may be rooted in that era of humiliation.
When politicians from the south like Strum Thurmond of the Dixiecrats and George Wallace said “segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever,” the refrain roared from that sour blood.
Hence, it is remarkable that a man like Carter rose from there. Martin Luther King Jr. said he expected the racial equality to begin from the south first. Genuine blacks distrust northeast elites who espouse liberal ideas but cannot host a black man in their front porches. A white friend who lived in Boulder, Colorado, a city of inherited wealth, was in my book club. He said, my neighbours love poor people but they don’t want them near.” They donate to charities but cannot share a quart of beer in a bar.
The blacks trust a white man from the south who loved when he loved and hated when he hated. Like Carter. After all, a good gem comes out of fire. Like our man from Plains, Georgia.
