By: Miriam Edelman
DCNOW mourns President Jimmy Carter. On December 29, 2024, the oldest living President and the only President from Georgia in U.S. history died at age 100. Like Carter’s wife Rosalynn who died in November 2023, he passed away in their same simple home where they spent much of their adult lives. They had the longest presidential marriage – more than 77 years, which was longer than the lives of most Presidents. Carter outlived his wife, his Vice President, most of his Cabinet members, aides and allies, President Gerald Ford (whom Carter defeated to become President in 1976), and President Ronald Reagan (who defeated Carter to become President in 1980). Carter received a melanoma diagnosis in 2015 and had been in hospice since February 2023.
Born on October 1, 1924, in Plains, Georgia, Carter was the first President born in a hospital. After attending public schools and two Georgia institutions of higher learning, he earned a B.S. degree from the United States Naval Academy. In 1946, he married Rosalynn Smith, who also was from Plains. After serving in the Navy, he and his family lived in Georgia. He was a peanut farmer. Carter served on multiple county boards and in the Georgia Senate. He was also Georgia’s 76th Governor and the Democratic National Committee campaign Chair for the 1974 Congressional and Gubernatorial elections.
From 1977 through 1981, Carter was the 39th President of the United States. In 1977, Carter became the first President to be inaugurated by a nickname (“Jimmy,” not his real first name “James”) and to walk in the Inaugural parade. Since Carter, Presidents have followed this tradition of walking in their parades. Carter was credited with creating the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. He brought everlasting peace to Israel and Egypt through the Camp David accords. In 1977, Carter also signed the Panama Canal treaties that gave control of the Panama Canal to Panama. In 1979, Carter and Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping normalized their countries’ diplomatic relations, which had been strained since the Communist Party created the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and the United States supported the Nationalists who went to Taiwan.
As President, Carter was a strong proponent for women’s equality. Carter called for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1978, when he extended the time for states to ratify the proposed amendment, he said:
Our concern for human rights must begin at home, and the rights of citizenship must be protected, regardless of sex. I believe it is past time for that protection to be written into the Constitution of the United States. That is why I have been so strongly committed to ERA, and why I urged the Senate to take the action it took today.
In 1978, his Executive Order 12050, entitled "National Advisory Committee for Women,” created a National Advisory Committee for Women. In 1978, he signed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which bars sex discrimination based on pregnancy. He also signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which the U.S. Senate still has not ratified. In 1980, as President, Carter signed the U.S.’s first National Women’s History Week proclamation. This leadership helped lead to Women’s History Month in March. At his wife’s request, Carter created an East Wing office for the First Lady, which has existed since then.
Carter never appointed a Supreme Court justice, but he appointed 41 female and a record 57 minority judges. One of them was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom he appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. DCNOW’s blog post, entitled “Never Too Old for Public Service” discussed Ginsburg.
As DCNOW’s blog piece, entitled “Happy Belated Birthday, President Carter,” Carter was an ally of D.C.’s capital. For example, when Carter was President, he supported that era’s method of granting full Congressional voting representation to D.C. residents: a constitutional amendment.
Carter was a very active former President. In 1982, he founded the Carter Center, which focuses on human rights. An author of 32 books, Carter worked on conflict mediation around the world, monitored elections, almost eradicated dracunculiasis (which is also called the Guinea worm disease), built homes with Habitat for Humanity, and taught Sunday school in Plains. One of Carter’s Sunday School lessons from 2019 is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSl912YRDyE.
During Carter’s post-presidency, Carter received major honors. In 1999, then-President Bill Clinton gave Carter and Rosalynn the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S.’s highest civilian honor. In 2002, Carter received 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.”
Carter’s 2014 book, entitled A Call To Action, called for the end of discrimination and abuse against females. That book recommends the following 23 steps:
1. Encourage women and girls, including those not abused, to speak out more forcefully. It is imperative that those who do speak out are protected from retaliation.
2. Remind political and religious leaders of the abuses and what they can do to alleviate them.
3. Encourage these same leaders to become supporters of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and other U.N. agencies that advance human rights and peace.
4. Encourage religious and political leaders to relegate warfare and violence to a last resort as a solution to terrorism and national security challenges.
5. Abandon the death penalty and seek to rehabilitate criminals instead of relying on excessive incarceration, especially for nonviolent offenders.
6. Marshal the efforts of women officeholders and first ladies, and encourage involvement of prominent civilian women in correcting abuses.
7. Induce individual nations to elevate the end of human trafficking to a top priority, as they did to end slavery in the nineteenth century.
8. Help remove commanding officers from control over cases of sexual abuse in the military so that professional prosecutors can take action.
9. Apply title IX protection for women students and evolve laws and procedures in all nations to reduce the plague of sexual abuse on university campuses.
10. Include women's rights specifically in new U.N. Millennium Development Goals.
11. Expose and condemn infanticide of baby girls and selective abortion of female fetuses.
12. Explore alternatives to battered women's shelters, such as installing GPS locators on male abusers, and make police reports of spousal abuse mandatory.
13. Strengthen U.N. and other legal impediments to ending genital mutilation, child marriage, trafficking, and other abuses of girls and women.
14. Increase training of midwives and other health workers to provide care at birth.
15. Help scholars working to clarify religious beliefs on protecting women's rights and nonviolence, and give activists and practitioners access to such training resources.
16. Insist that the U.S. Senate ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
17. Insist that the United States adopt the International Violence Against Women Act.
18. Encourage more qualified women to seek public office, and support them.
19. Recruit influential men to assist in gaining equal rights for women.
20. Adopt the Swedish model by prosecuting pimps, brothel owners, and male customers, not the prostitutes.
21. Publicize and implement U.N. Security Resolution 1325, which encourages the participation of women in peace efforts.
22. Publicize and implement U.N. Security Resolution 1820, which condemns the use of sexual violence as a tool of war.
23. Condemn and outlaw honor killings.
President Joe Biden, who is now the oldest living current or former President, and Carter had a decades-long friendship. Carter was the first Senator and the first person outside of Georgia to endorse Carter’s long-shot Presidential bid in 1976. Around that time, Biden and then-Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN) wrote
“We believe being ‘right’ on the issues is not enough in 1976. Our nation and our party need a president who is not only right, but who has demonstrated ability to accomplish our common goal. We believe that person is Jimmy Carter.”
In April 2021, Biden marked his 100th day as President by traveling with his wife Jill to Plains, where they met with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter for approximately an hour. That visit was the first time a sitting President visited Jimmy Carter at Carter’s Plains home. After the visit, Biden said to reporters, “It was great to see President Carter. He reminded me that I was the first person to endorse him outside of Georgia. And we sat and talked about the old days.”
In January 2025, Carter will become the thirteenth President to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol. There will be a state funeral at the Washington National Cathedral on January 9th, which President Joe Biden has declared a National Day of Mourning. Biden and others are scheduled to speak. Then, Carter’s body will be flown to Georgia on a military plane and be buried next to Rosalynn in Plains.
Let’s always fondly remember civil rights champion President Jimmy Carter. As Biden and First Lady Biden said in a statement on Carter’s death:
With his [Carter’s] 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.
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