ATLANTA, Georgia –
Jimmy Carter’s lengthy public farewell began Saturday in Georgia, with the flag-draped casket of the 39th president of the United States making its long arc from the Depression-era South and family farm businesses to the pinnacle of political power. American and decades as a global humanitarian.
Those chapters shone through the opening stanza of a six-day state funeral that sought to combine personalized tributes with the ceremonial pageantry afforded to former presidents. Carter, the oldest American executive, died on December 29 at the age of 100.
“He was an incredible man. “An incredible woman held him, held him, and calmed him,” his son, James Earl “Chip” Carter III, told mourners at the Carter Center Saturday afternoon, referring to his father and former first lady Rosalynn Carter, who died. in 2023. “The two together changed the world. And it was kind of amazing to see it so close.”
Grandson Jason Carter, who now chairs the center’s board of directors, said, “It’s amazing what can be accumulated in a hundred years.”
Carter’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren accompanied their patriarch as his hearse made its way on the First Saturday through his hometown of Plains, which with about 700 residents is not much larger than when Carter was born there on Oct. 1, 1924. The procession He stopped at the farm. where the future president worked alongside the black sharecroppers who worked for his father. The motorcade continued to Atlanta and stopped in front of the Georgia Capitol, where Carter served as a state senator and reform governor.
Finally, he arrived for his final visit to the Carter Presidential Center, which houses his presidential library and the Carter Center where he based his post-White House advocacy for public health, democracy and human rights, setting a new standard for what the former presidents can do. achieve after they give up power.
“His spirit fills this place,” Jason Carter said at the assembly that included some of the center’s 3,000 employees around the world. “It continues the vibrant living legacy of what was my grandfather’s life’s work,” he added.
Saturday’s pallbearers came from the Secret Service that protected the Carters for nearly half a century and a military honor guard that included members of the Navy for the only U.S. Naval Academy graduate to make it to the Oval Office . A military band played “Hail to the Chief” and the hymn “Be Thou My Vision” for the commander in chief, who was also a devout Baptist.
His longtime personal pastor, the Rev. Tony Lowden, remembered not a president, but the frail man who spent the last 22 months in hospice care, “wrapped in a blanket” that included the words of Psalm 23.
Chip Carter remembered “the boss” he had to make an appointment to see in the Oval Office, but also the father who spent the entire Christmas break learning Latin and tutoring his eighth-grade son who had failed a test. When he took that test again, young Carter said, he aced it: “I owed it to my father, who spent that kind of time with me.”
Jimmy Carter will lie in state at the Carter Presidential Center from 7 pm Saturday to 6 am Tuesday, and the public will be able to pay their respects 24 hours a day.
Scott Lyle, an engineer who grew up in Georgia but now lives in New York, was among the first mourners to pay his respects. Lyle said he joined Carter to build homes with Habitat for Humanity for the first time in LaGrange, Georgia, in 2003. Since then, he has traveled around the world to build homes with the group.
“I was able to see what some people can’t see, up close. He was a wonderful man and cared about others. He walked the walk,” said Lyle, who was wearing Carter-themed Habitat gear. “And I can’t think of anyone else I’d want to stand in line to pay my respects for.”
The national rites will continue in Washington and conclude Thursday with a funeral at Washington National Cathedral, followed by a return to Plains. There, the former president will be buried next to his wife of 77 years, near the house they built before his first campaign for the state Senate in 1962.
The Carters lived almost their entire lives in Plains, with the exception of their naval service, four years in the Governor’s Mansion and four years in the White House. As his hearse drove through the city, mourners lined the main street, some holding bouquets of flowers and wearing brooches with images of the former president and his trademark smile.
Willie Browner, 75, described Carter as coming from a bygone era of American politics.
“This man thought about more than himself,” said Browner, who grew up in the town of Parrott, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) from Plains. Browner said it meant “a lot” for a president to come from a small Southern town like his, something he worries won’t happen again.
In fact, Carter helped plan his own funeral to emphasize that his remarkable rise to the world stage was because of, not despite, his deep rural roots.
Over the course of a few blocks in Plains, the motorcade passed near where the Carters ran the family peanut store and the small house where their mother, a nurse, had given birth to the future first lady in 1927. The hearse He passed by the old train station. which served as headquarters for Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign, a grassroots effort that relied on public financing, overshadowed by the billion-dollar American presidential campaigns of the 21st century.
At Carter’s farm, a few dozen National Park Service rangers stood in formation in front of the house, which had no running water or electricity when Carter was a child. The old farmhouse bell rang 39 times to honor Carter’s place as the 39th president.
Next to the house remains the tennis court that Carter’s father, James Earl Carter Sr., built for the family, a nod to the combination of privilege and tough rural life that defined the future president’s upbringing. Carter worked the land during the Great Depression, but it was owned by the elder Carter, who employed surrounding black tenant farmers during the Jim Crow segregation era.
Carter wrote and spoke extensively about those formative years and how the abject poverty and institutional racism he saw influenced his government policies and human rights work.
Calvin Smyre, a former Georgia lawmaker, remembered that legacy Saturday at the state Capitol. Smyre, who is black, said Carter’s repudiation of racial segregation allowed blacks to exercise power in Georgia.
“We stand on the shoulders of brave people like Jimmy Carter,” Smyre said. “What he did shocked and shook the political terrain here in the state of Georgia. And we live better because of that.”
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Payne reported from Plains, Georgia.
