Black residents of Plains, Georgia can recall Carter's efforts to maintain and then later resist the racist policies that targeted the majority Black community. How Jimmy Carter's relationship with Black America was 'different from other southerners':
Former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton join President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama at a ceremony commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Aug. 28, 2013.In 1976, African Americans catapulted the underdog Democrat to the White House with 83% support.
The foundation of his relationships with Black voters and leaders was built in his home base of Plains, in rural Sumter County, Georgia. Its Black residents can recall his efforts to maintain and then later resist the racist policies and practices that targeted the majority Black community.
Historians say that Carter, early in his career, was both a creature and a critic of the strict segregationist system he had been born into. He largely kept his head down as civil rights advocates fought and sacrificed to change the status quo, with serious, and sometimes dangerous, protests and crackdowns flaring up in Sumter County.
By the mid-1950s, Carter returned from a stint as a naval officer and settled in Plains, where he built on the family’s successful peanut business. The Brown v. Board of Education decision, which dismantled the old separate-but-equal regime for American schools, had inflamed white Southerners.
They did. Carter expanded the presence of Black Georgians in state government, from senior officials to state troopers, and welcomed civil rights leaders to the governor’s office. It went the same way with other influential civil rights leaders in Georgia, including King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and his father, Martin Luther King Sr. According to author and journalist Kandy Stroud, the elder King sent a telegram to voters lauding Carter’s appointment of Black judges and his support for a fair housing law, among other things. “I know a man I can trust, Blacks can trust, and that man is Jimmy Carter,” he wrote.
As a presidential candidate, however, Carter again showed his propensity for trying to have it both ways in a racially divided country.
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