The United States flag flies at half-staff in Washington as I write these words in Albuquerque, where an overcast sky drapes over the land like a pall.
I am in mourning.
Jimmy Carter is dead, the only man I know of who turned the presidency into a footnote by dedicating his life to public service, to helping the less fortunate around the globe.
His death cuts deep, like the loss of a family member. I am a Georgian by birth and upbringing. Not only was Jimmy Carter the first president I remember inhabiting the Oval Office, but he was also the first president who sounded like me and people I knew growing up.
I did not develop this deep well of awe for Jimmy Carter all by myself. My mom and dad were huge fans.
They were immensely proud when the Georgian with the familiar accent and 1,000-watt smile won the presidency in 1976. One of us had finally made it to the White House, was the feeling. And not just any old Southerner, he was a white evangelical Southerner like themselves.
Their kinship with Jimmy Carter went deeper than the loamy soil of Georgia.
Born in the 1930s into the Jim Crow South, my mother and father had lived through the cataclysmic changes of the 1950s and ’60s that ripped apart the South and many Southern families as courageous, morally tough African Americans, with their allies, successfully demanded equal treatment under the law.
Seeing white officials blast children with water hoses and sic dogs on them had turned white Southerners into the butt of national jokes and easily caricatured villains.
My parents never talked about that shameful period. It was best left unexamined.
“It’s too painful,” my mother said once as I pressed her and my father about the 1950s and ’60s.
But Jimmy Carter? They would talk about him all day long. Here was a white Southerner who presented a different South to the world — a New South that had no time for the older generations’ legalized racism, much less the de facto bigotry one still found among Southern whites.
However, most important to my parents was that Jimmy Carter took his faith seriously.
My parents were churchgoing folk. In addition to morning and evening services, my mom taught Sunday school and hosted Bible studies in our house while my dad served two terms as the chairman of the governing board of our church, at the time the largest congregation in Augusta, Ga.
So, when Jimmy returned to Georgia after losing the presidency, my parents were immediately impressed that he and Rosalynn set to help those who were less fortunate than they were, whether it was Americans who didn’t have homes or Africans suffering from terrible maladies like the Guinea worm disease, it was as if the Carters had transformed Jesus’ words if you have done it to the least of these, you have done it to me into action. It wasn’t just a biblical passage to memorize to the Carters, but a way to live. That spoke volumes to our family.
As the Carters did their thing, my mom wended her own path through white Southern religious culture. After years of teaching Sunday school and hosting bible studies, she felt God’s call to preach. But she was told she would not be ordained by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). In the previous decade the denomination had begun to ordain women but had stopped once fundamentalists took over the SBC in the mid 1980s.
Not one to take no for an answer, especially when God was speaking to her, my mom chose to leave the denomination and become Presbyterian rather than sink into a life of untapped potential and bitterness. She attended a Presbyterian seminary in Atlanta and was ordained a minister in that denomination in the late 1980s.
A decade later, Jimmy Carter departed the Southern Baptist Convention, citing its prohibition against ordaining women to preach as his rationale. I remember a welling up of emotion when I read the news. It was as if Jimmy Carter were standing with my mom, validating her rocky path to become an ordained minister. I almost tear up writing those words.
I can’t remember if my parents or brother ever made the pilgrimage in later years to Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains where Jimmy Carter taught Sunday School. But several friends made the trek.
They’d tell me what it was like to see the great man and how genuine and humble he seemed.
I wished I had made the time to visit Maranatha Baptist Church.
Sometimes, I need a reminder in this world of ours, which often seems to reward aggression and win-at-all-costs attitude, that good guys don’t always finish last, and that genuineness and humility still matter.
Godspeed, Jimmy Carter, thank you for a life well lived.
Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet.