William Wordsworth wrote famously that the “child is father of the man.” Nothing is so strong, the poet said, in who we become as our own experiences in youth.
So, how did the young Jimmy Carter become the man who is being honored this week? Is his youth in the Jim Crow South at the root of his pro-civil rights political record?
“It’s still a part of me, the way it was back in the twenties and thirties,” Carter told me on Hardball. “All my playmates were black kids. They were the kids who I worked with in the field, went hunting and fishing with, wrestled with and tried to outrun.”
Carter also understood the deference, so often called privilege, that he was afforded and his friends were not.
“I knew that when we jumped on a train, my black playmates would sit in a different boxcar from me. And when we walked down the street holding hands. But when we got to the movie house, though, I knew that my friends had to go up to the third floor and sit on dirty little dinky hard seats, and I sat on the first floor, you know, on a soft seat.”
“And so we would get back on the train and go back home. And I knew they went to different schools and a different church. I still didn’t realize that they were treating me differently. In fact, most of the time, they didn’t because the one who was dominant was the one that caught the biggest fish or would kill the most squirrels or ran the fastest or jumped the highest.”
But as Carter became a teenager, he noticed how things began to change.
“When I was about fourteen years old, two of my black friends and I were coming out of the field. We got all the way to the barn. And we got to what we called a pasture gate. And when we started to go through the gate, they stood back to let me go first.
“When I was an adult looking back on it that, their parents must have just told them, ‘You know, it’s time for you all to start Jimmy as a white person.’”
It was in the U.S. Navy, as a submarine officer, that he realized how the world could change.
“I had no thought about going into public office when I was young. When I was six years old, If anybody asked me what I was gonna do when I grew up, I would say, ‘I’m gonna go to the Naval Academy and be a Naval officer.’ And that’s all I wanted to do. I wanted to go to Annapolis.”
It was in 1948, while Carter was on active duty, that President Harry S. Truman declared that racial segregation would no longer be allowed in the U.S. military.
Carter was honest about how this affected him, a child of the white South.
“I really didn’t see the advantages of doing away with segregation until I was in the submarine force.
“When I came back from the Navy, of course, I had been living on subs with blacks.”
But back home in the deep south, he realized racial conditions hadn’t changed.
“But Plains, Georgia, hadn’t changed that much. We had boycotts against our business.”
That was because you wouldn’t join the White Citizens Council?
“Yeah! So, one day, I took my pickup truck to the only service station in town, and they refused to put gasoline in my car. So, I had to get my own gas pump, and we lost a lot of business.”
“But Georgia eventually changed, primarily because of the influence of the Atlanta Constitution and the examples set by the Atlanta mayors. Georgia didn’t do what Alabama and Mississippi and Arkansas did. We didn’t stand in the schoolhouse door! We had 200 school boards; I was chairman of one of them.”
In his 1971 inaugural address, Governor Carter declared for himself and for his state that “the days of racial segregation are over.”
