WASHINGTON, D.C.—James Earl Carter Jr., the Georgia peanut farmer turned 39th president, turned Nobel Peace Prize winner will be remembered by many for criticizing U.S. foreign policy, having a UFO encounter, writing 33 books, renovating 4,300 homes and condemning Israeli actions in Palestine as apartheid.
He died December 29 at the age of 100 and funeral plans include events in Georgia and Washington, D.C., that began Jan. 4 and will conclude Jan. 9. His body will lie in repose at the Georgia State Capital and then flown to D.C. on January 7, where it will lie in state in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol, allowing the public to pay their respects.
“With his compassion and moral clarity, he worked to eradicate disease, forge peace, advance civil rights and human rights, promote free and fair elections, house the homeless, and always advocate for the least among us. He saved, lifted, and changed the lives of people all across the globe,” said President Joe Biden in a released statement.
President Biden designated Jan. 9, a National Day of Mourning, and invited people worldwide to participate in the solemn commemoration.
President Carter had a humble beginning. He was born on October 1, 1924, to James Earl Carter Sr. and Lillian Gordy Carter. Their home, situated in the small south Georgia town of Plains, lacked electricity.
He grew up during the Great Depression in the segregated Deep South, but Mr. Carter often played with Black children. These interactions influenced his thoughts on integration and were reflected in his political career.
He went to college and then the Navy. After the military, Mr. Carter focused on raising his family. He was married to Rosalynn Carter, who was by his side for 77 years. Together they focused on managing the family’s peanut farm.
He soon began his political career, securing a seat in the Georgia Senate in 1962. Although he failed to win the Democratic nomination for governor against segregationist Lester Maddox in 1966, Mr. Carter successfully campaigned for the same position four years later.
On September 18, 1973, then Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter filed a report with the National Investigations Committee on aerial phenomena that he saw a UFO four years earlier. Governor Carter explained that the experience led him to have more respect for others who have seen UFOs.
“There were about 20 of us standing outside of a little restaurant, I believe, a high school lunchroom,” he told reporters. “And a kind of green light appeared in the western sky. This was right after sundown.
It got brighter and brighter. And then it eventually disappeared.” Other witnesses described it as “very bright, changing colors and about the size of the moon.”
Mr. Carter’s next stop was the White House with Rosalynn as his first lady. He vowed in his inaugural address to put universal rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy.
“Our moral sense dictates a clear-cut preference for those societies which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights. We do not seek to intimidate, but it is clear that a world which others can dominate with impunity would be inhospitable to decency and a threat to the well-being of all people,” he said.
“I join in the hope that when my time as your president has ended, people might say this about our nation,” he said. “I would hope that the nations of the world might say that we had built a lasting peace, based not on weapons of war but on international policies which reflect our own most precious values.”
International peace was a foundation of Mr. Carter’s presidency. One of his most significant achievements as president was the Camp David Accords, reached after exhaustive negotiations between Egypt and Israel that peaked at the presidential retreat in Maryland. It was the first of many peace deals between the Zionist state and Arab countries that didn’t last.
Over time, Carter became dismayed with Israeli leadership, becoming deeply critical of what he saw as a failure to live up to obligations toward the Palestinians. He sparked controversy in 2006 by saying that Israel’s settlement policies on the West Bank were tantamount to the apartheid policies of South Africa.
In 2006, while promoting his book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” President Carter said, “It’s based on a minority of Israelis occupying, confiscating and colonizing land that belongs to the Palestinians,” he told The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith.
“When Israel does occupy this territory deep within the West Bank and connects 200 or so settlements (to) each other with a road and prohibits the Palestinians from using that road, in many cases even crossing the road—this perpetrates even worse instances of … apartheid than we witnessed in South Africa.”
While he was a beacon on international affairs, it was the takeover of the U.S. Embassy and 66 hostages in Iran on November 4, 1979, a year before the U.S. election, that began to erode President Carter’s support. The 444-day standoff transfixed the nation and gradually tanked President Carter’s hopes of a second term. He was defeated by Ronald Reagan.
He left office in 1980 and became an elder statesman. In 2002 he won the Nobel Peace Prize “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 world has changed greatly since I left the White House,” he said in his acceptance speech. “Now there is only one superpower, with unprecedented military and economic strength.
The coming budget for American armaments will be greater than those of the next 15 nations combined, and there are troops from the United States in many countries throughout the world.
Our gross national economy exceeds that of the three countries that follow us, and our nation’s voice most often prevails as decisions are made concerning trade, humanitarian assistance, and the allocation of global wealth. This dominant status is unlikely to change in our lifetimes,” the former president said.
“To suggest that war can prevent war is a base play on words and a despicable form of warmongering. The objective of any who sincerely believe in peace clearly must be to exhaust every honorable recourse in the effort to save the peace. The world has had ample evidence that war begets only conditions that beget further war.”
President Cater became a best-selling author, worked with Habitat for Humanity to renovate homes and let people know his thoughts on America and the world.
In 2004 during an interview with The Independent on the first anniversary of the American and British invasion of Iraq, President Carter said the two leaders probably knew that many of the claims being made about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were based on imperfect intelligence.
“There was no reason for us to become involved in Iraq recently,” he said. “That was a war based on lies and misinterpretations from London and from Washington, claiming falsely that Saddam Hussein was responsible for [the] 9/11 attacks, claiming falsely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
And I think that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair probably knew that many of the allegations were based on uncertain intelligence … a decision was made to go to war [then people said] ‘Let’s find a reason to do so.’”
In 2021, Brother Askia Muhammad, the late senior editor for The Final Call and former editor of Muhammad Speaks, wrote a column in The Washington Informer about President Carter. “Jimmy Carter was always a genuine, down-home, grime-under-the-fingernails kind of peanut farmer and patriot.
He was a good soul, I would say. But understand, he may have been innocent, pure of heart like a choir boy, but he occupied the seat of the character in Scripture referred to as ‘Pharaoh,’” Brother Askia Muhammad wrote in the column titled, “More Honors Due to President Jimmy Carter.”
“America is a land of torment for Black people and that continues no matter who is president. The president who sits in Pharaoh’s seat must perform many wicked and despicable acts, in the name of the United States of America.
It goes with the territory. The fact that Carter was a one-term president speaks highly of him when it comes to the wicked deeds he didn’t perform, … to get reelected,” he wrote.
—Nisa Islam Muhammad, Staff Writer
