President James Earl Carter Jr., the 39th president of the United States, was laid to rest on Jan. 9 in what President Joe Biden designated as a national day of mourning.
Family, friends, colleagues shared words at the state funeral service, which took place at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. They highlighted President Carter’s heart, character and love, and lifted his devotion to God and humanity.
After the service, President Carter’s family held a private ceremony in Plains, Georgia, his hometown, where he was buried next to his longtime wife, Rosalynn Carter. He died December 29, 2024, at the age of 100 (See The Final Call Vol. 44 No. 14).
President Carter was “a White Southern Baptist who led on civil rights, a decorated Navy veteran who brokered peace, a brilliant nuclear engineer who led on nuclear nonproliferation, a hardworking farmer who championed conservation and clean energy and a president who redefined the relationship with a vice president,” President Joe Biden said at the service.
“Through it all, he showed us how character and faith start with ourselves and then flow to others. At our best, we share the better parts of ourselves—joy, solidarity, love, commitment—not for reward.
But in reverence for an incredible gift of life we have all been granted to make every minute of our time here on Earth count. That’s the definition of a good life, a life Jimmy Carter lived during his 100 years,” he continued.
Reflections from grandsons
Lines sometimes waited outside Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia in anticipation of President Carter’s Sunday school classes. When he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, his Sunday school students were the first to hear the news.
“At the end of his Nobel Peace Prize lecture, he stated the most serious and universal problem on our planet is the growing chasm between the richest and poorest people on Earth.
For the next two decades, as the problem compounded, he returned to this theme with stories from the Bible and stories from today of the richest people in the world using their enormous wealth to buy a nation’s poverty,” Joshua Carter, President Carter’s grandson, said during the service.
Jason Carter said his grandfather “had the courage and strength to stick to his principles even when they were politically unpopular” and was the same person in public and private.
“That’s the definition of integrity,” said Jason Carter. “That honesty was matched by love; it was matched by faith.”
He described his grandfather’s life as a love story. “I believe that that love is what taught him and told him to preach the power of human rights, not just for some people but for all people,” he said. He shared an example of how, through the Carter Center, his grandfather contributed to the near eradication of Guinea worm disease.
“When he started working on this disease, there were three and a half million cases in humans every year. Last year, there were 14. And the thing that’s remarkable is that this disease is not eliminated with medicine.
It’s eliminated, essentially, by neighbors talking to neighbors about how to collect water in the poorest and most marginalized villages in the world,” Jason Carter said.
“When he saw a tiny 600-person village that everybody else thinks of as poor, he recognized it. That’s where he was from. That’s who he was. And he never saw it as a place to send pity.
It was always a place to find partnership and power and a place to carry out that commandment to love your neighbor as yourself,” he added. “Essentially, he eradicated a disease with love and respect.
He waged peace with love and respect. He led this nation with love and respect. To me, this life was a love story from the moment that he woke up until he laid his head.”
Reflections from friends and colleagues
President Carter shared a deep friendship with President Gerald Ford, the country’s 38th president. They promised to eulogize one another’s funerals. President Ford passed away at 93 years old in 2006. He wrote a eulogy for his friend while he was alive.
He commended President Carter for his honesty and truth-telling. “For Jimmy Carter, honesty was not an aspirational goal; it was part of his very soul,” Steven Ford, President Ford’s son, read.
Walter Mondale served as vice president under President Carter. Though he died at 93 in 2021, he also prepared words to be shared about President Carter, read by his son, Ted Mondale. He described the former president as a person who elevated human rights and pushed to advance the rights of women,
Including extending the period for states to approve the Equal Rights Amendment in 1978 and appointing women to the U.S. Departments of Commerce, HEW (Health, Education and Welfare), Education and HUD (Housing and Urban Development).
“Women on his White House staff played crucial roles in developing his highest priority energy and environmental proposals, and he dramatically increased the ranks of female circuit and district court judges,” Vice President Mondale wrote.
“Two decades ago, President Carter said he believed income inequality was the biggest global issue. More recently in a 2018 commencement address at Liberty University he said, ‘I think now the largest global issue is the discrimination against women and girls in this world.’”
“He concluded that until stubborn attitudes that foster discrimination against women change, the world cannot advance, and poverty and income equality cannot be solved,” he added.
Stuart Eizenstat, former chief domestic policy adviser to President Carter, spoke on how he “parked politics at the Oval Office door to do what he believed was the right thing, taking controversial challenges on, regardless of the political consequences.”
He credited President Carter with “dramatically [increasing] funding for low- and moderate-income students and contributing to ethics in government laws, comprehensive civil service reform and the creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
In addition, he recognized the former president for his environmental work. He set aside tens of millions of acres of national parkland and “provided the first incentives for conservation and inaugurated the era of clean energy and symbolized it with solar panels he installed on the White House roof,” Mr. Eizenstat said.
He also lifted the humanitarian efforts of President Carter. “In the end, Jimmy Carter taught all of us how to live a life fulfilled with faith and service,” he concluded. “He said: ‘I have one life to live. I feel like God wants me to do the best I can do with it, so let me live my life so that it will be meaningful.’”
Andrew Young, 92, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in Carter’s administration, was among the last speakers on the program and delivered illuminating and poignant remarks as he sat next to the casket.
“Dr. (Martin Luther) King used to say that greatness is characterized by antipathies strongly marked. You’ve got to have a tough mind and a tender heart. And that was Jimmy Carter. And he grew up in the tremendous diversity of the South, and he embraced both sides,” said Mr. Young.
“He was a minority in Sumter County. Just about 20, 25 percent of the population was White. But growing up as a minority, he became the friend of the majority. And when he went to the Naval Academy, he asked that his roommate be the first Black midshipman,”
Mr. Young said. “He went out of his way to embrace those of us who had grown up in all kinds of conflict. But that was the sensitivity, the spirituality that made James Earl Carter a truly great President,” he added.
“Thank you, President Carter, and thank you, Almighty God,” Mr. Young concluded.
