“Jimmy Carter for me was something of a miracle … It is hard for me to understand just how you could be President from Plains, Georgia … He was a minority in Sumter County, but he became the friend of the majority … I have known President Carter for more than half of my life and I never cease to be surprised, enlightened, and inspired by the little deeds of love and mercy he shared with us everyday of his life. It was President James Earl Carter that for me symbolized the greatness of America. He may be gone, but he ain’t gone far”.
—Rev Andrew Young (92), in his funeral oration for President Jimmy Carter, January 9, 2025.
Reverend Andrew Young was not speaking of the Biblical miracle. Rather, he was trying to portray President Jimmy Carter as someone who did extraordinary things and to whom extraordinary things happened. He spoke of two of such things in the opening quote: First, it was extraordinary for Carter to have become President of the United States from a small rural village in the Deep South and in a County in which Blacks accounted for about 80 percent of the population.
Second, growing up as a minority in such a community at the height of racial segregation in which his father even partook, it was extraordinary for Carter to have embraced Blacks as much as he did. Carter shared this trait with Fidel Castro of Cuba, who grew up on his father’s sugar cane plantation, but hated the way Blacks were treated by his father and other Whites. This experience fueled Castro’s rebellion against the establishment and pushed him to socialism.
However, operating within a democratic system, Carter was not anti-establishment, but he embraced minorities that the establishment has ignored. He employed more Blacks and women into office than all Presidents before him combined. Andrew Young was one of those minorities. Carter appointed him as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations.
As it turned out, it was not only minorities within the United States that Carter embraced. As his presidency and post-presidency activities showed (see Jimmy Carter, January 8, and Jimmy Carter’s post-presidency, January 15, both in The Nation), Carter embraced humanity, focusing on the poor, the homeless, the insecure, and the oppressed across the globe. His ultimate goal was social and human development for which he considered education, healthcare, peace, and security as necessary requirements.
Carter was the first “unknown” (that is, not nationally recognised candidate) to become President. No one expected him to win the Democratic primary, but he did, largely by relying on popular folk musicians to raise money for him. With their help and his plain talk, focusing on the truth (in contrast to the lies of the Nixon era before him), he went on to win the presidential election.
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Carter had an aversion to wealth, stemming from growing up in a rural village without electricity and running water. So, he went into office with a vow that he was not going to enrich himself. He even fought legislators on pork barrel (budget padding) practices, even to his own disadvantage. When he lost reelection, he went back to his farm in Plains Georgia, and lived in the bungalow he and his wife had owned. He was now a debtor, because the farm he had put in trust four years earlier had been run aground. He had to sell the farm’s warehouse to raise money to save the farm. He put the farm in the hands of caretakers again, when the now famous Carter Center was built in association with Emory University in Atlanta, which became the base of his global charity work until death. The only other property in his name was his presidential library in Atlanta, built on donations. He owned a small office/bedroom, where the bed is a foldaway, which flushes with the wall when not in use, to the amazement of the reporter, who interviewed him there.
Carter did not just do extraordinary things. Some unusual things also happened to him. Every member of his family—father, mother, and three siblings, died of cancer. His father and all three siblings died of pancreatic cancer in their fifties, except one sister, who lived to be 63. His mother first had breast cancer, which then moved to her pancreas and killed her at 85. Jimmy Carter also had his bout with cancer. Shortly after turning 90, he was afflicted with metastatic melanoma, a skin cancer with less than 10% survival rate! Miraculously, you would say, nonagenarian Carter became cancer-free, following radiation therapy and treatment with a cancer immunotherapy.
He would go on to live beyond 100–the longest lived President with the longest (action-packed) presidency in American history.
There are several dualities in Jimmy Carter’s life: A White minority in the middle of a Black majority. An unknown rural farmer defeating a wealthy Ford as candidate of the other party. An unlikely peace maker, who settled decades-long conflict between two adversaries (Israel and Egypt). The most powerful man in the world becoming a carpenter, building homes for the homeless and providing healthcare for millions across the globe, including Nigeria. A candidate, who never forgot the musicians that propelled him to the White House—he invited them to the White House time and again, even against the advice of close friends and the White House staff.
To conclude that Carter was probably propelled to do good by White guilt is to disregard the man’s soul in the assessment. Here was a Christian, who taught Sunday School until 95 and vowed to live by his creed, by doing good for humanity. Rather than see Black and White as distinct races, he saw a common humanity, and pushed his country toward global interdependency.
Carter’s political career hold three big lessons for politicians: One, make hay while the sun shines—Carter’s major achievements during his presidency came within the first two years of his administration. Two, Carter did not see power as a means of personal enrichment; rather, it should be used to facilitate fair and equitable access to political goods. Three, his post-presidency shows that the job of a President is for life, not in terms of the paraphernalia of office but in terms of continuing to serve humanity in meaningful ways.
It was the totality of his contributions that the Nobel cited in his award for peace in 2002 “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” The Nobel Committee would be pleased to know that Carter continued with “untiring effort” for two decades after the award.
Of course, Carter’s political opponents did not always like his humanitarianism and forward-looking programmes, when he was President. They even hated his elaborate post-presidential achievements even more, and they are bent on wiping them out. As a result, his immediate successor, President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, reversed his environmental policies, by removing solar panels Carter got installed on the roof of the White House to cut costs. The present President, Donald Trump, and his men are moving to close down the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Education, both of which Carter established. The Republican party continues to deny climate change and has been challenging the necessity for the Department of Energy, also established by Carter.
No matter what they do, however, Carter’s sterling achievements have been written in stone. It is unlikely that any President could match his longevity, his humanity, his love of peace as a necessary condition for development, and his global outreach.
Andrew Young said it all: “He may be gone, but he ain’t gone far”, either from our memories or from the pages of history.
