Son Of The South: How Jimmy Carter Transformed America

The summer after he was sworn in as president, Jimmy Carter flew to Mississippi, that deepest of Deep South states, and articulated the mix of pride, swagger, insecurity and optimism he shared with his home region.

“People just didn't believe that a Southerner could be elected president,” Carter said upon landing at Jackson’s airport. “But you and I together showed them they were wrong. And for the last six months, strangely enough, I haven't seen much in the newspapers or magazines about my being a Southerner. Now I, like you, am an American.”

That Carter had to say that at all illustrates how set apart the South was from the rest of the nation, even as late as the 1970s. That it never was again is a testament to what Carter’s campaign, victory and administration represented.

As the former president is laid to rest this week, his critics and enthusiasts are at odds about what his presidency meant to the country and the world. But there should be no debate about what the son of Plains, Georgia, meant for the South.

Leading a cohort of next-generation Southern leaders in both parties, Carter grafted the region back on the national map by repudiating Jim Crow, firmly and finally extinguishing George Wallace as a political force and assembling a fearsome, if fleeting, biracial general election coalition.

“He brought the South back into the mainstream, suddenly there was a legitimacy to being Southern, said Curtis Wilkie, the longtime political journalist and Mississippian.

After 1976, nobody who emerged from the South to seek the presidency ran strictly on racist appeals. Carter and a group of other “New South” leaders helped transform the region — and views of the region.

“The rest of the country took notice and eventually the world took notice,” said former Sen. Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who was himself first elected to the Senate in 1972 and credited several other racial moderates including Arkansas’ Dale Bumpers, Florida’s Reubin Askew and South Carolina’s John West.

It can be difficult to grasp in an era of nationalized and homogenized politics — when the consummate New Yorker is the toast of much of the old Confederacy — but it was extraordinary then that a native of the Deep South could become president.

“The South was still carrying the burden of the Civil War,” Andrew Young, the soon-to-be 93-year-old civil rights leader and lawmaker who Carter made U.N. Ambassador, reminded me last week.

Nobody from the region had been elected president since the war, at least not in the eyes of Southerners, who thought Woodrow Wilson a northerner because of his New Jersey pedigree and Lyndon Johnson more a creature of Washington and Texas a different breed, anyway.

A farmer, a Southern Baptist and a native of South Georgia with the accent to match, Carter was unambiguously of the Deep South.

With his open hand to Black voters, though, he was not a reminder of the bad old days. And in 1976, the images from Little Rock, Oxford, Tuscaloosa, Philadelphia, Selma and Memphis were all fresh memories, closer then than what 9/11 is to today.

“He was comfortable in the Black church,” said Young, who began his career as a pastor, recalling that he first met Carter through Martin Luther King Jr’s father, who was also a pastor. “He went out of his way to cultivate Daddy King as a state legislator.”In the late 1960s, that distinguished Carter.

“The most important thing about him as a Southerner is that he wasn’t a Ross Barnett, an Orval Faubus, a Wallace, you can go through the list,” said the longtime journalist, and Pensacola, Florida, native, Eleanor Randolph who covered the 1976 race. “He was almost like Southern nobility, he not only went to the Naval Academy, but he was an intellectual, he read [Reinhold] Niebuhr. He reminded people that not all Southerners are picking their teeth or straight out of Hee Haw.” If this all made Carter palatable to a national audience, his roots made him particularly appealing in his native region. In fact, he was elected president because of the South.

His 1976 electoral map there is a mirror image of the one from last November: Carter carried every single state from the old Confederacy except Virginia, where President Gerald Ford prevailed, just as President-elect Donald Trump swept the entire South but for Virginia.

“There was a palpable pride about him in the South and Carter stoked it and profited from it,” recalled Howell Raines, the former New York Times editor, who was political editor of the Atlanta Constitution when Carter was Georgia governor.

Carter was also the beneficiary of exquisite timing. By running 11 years after the Voting Rights Act, he was able to win over millions of enfranchised Southern Black people while still retaining the votes of Southern whites who remained loyal to their ancestral party, many of them having come of age when Franklin D. Roosevelt was as popular there as air conditioning.

Carter fused both blocs — claiming the simultaneous support Daddy King and George Corley Wallace in the general election.

It was no small feat then, never to be fully repeated, and it’s what propelled him to the presidency when Mississippi was finally called deep into election night in 1976.

Stepping onto the tarmac in Jackson the following summer, Carter greeted the local dignitaries and immediately recounted how he won. “Just so nobody has any doubt that I know, and just so I don't have any doubt that you know, do you all remember what state put me over the top on election night?” he said to applause. “Very good.”

Carter was in less good cheer the morning after his actual victory, though.

Wilkie, who covered the 1976 campaign for The Boston Globe, told me he has a vivid memory of Carter “stomping back” to the press cabin on the campaign plane in the first hours of his victory.

“I said, ‘Congratulations, I didn’t have to work very hard to deliver Massachusetts but I had to work like hell to carry Mississippi,’” Wilkie recounted telling Carter.

“He looked at me with those Rickover eyes,” Wilkie added, alluding to Hyman Rickover, one of Carter’s submariner superiors and a legendary sailor, and said, “‘If it weren’t for people like you this would have been over at nine last night.’”

Wilkie explains: “He thought I was a smartass, which I was.”But that exchange gets to what Raines calls Carter’s “dichotomous” nature.

He could be prickly, aloof or just “a little bit weird,” as Wilkie put it.

“My colleagues kept referring to Jimmy Carter as a ‘good ol’ boy,’ and I said, ‘Guys, Jimmy Carter doesn’t come close to being a good ol’ boy,’” said Wilkie, adding that Carter’s brother Billy, who owned a service station, had a namesake beer and one time in Wilkie’s presence fired a pistol in the air vaguely at a relatively he didn’t like, very much did merit the designation.

What Carter was, to the core, was an ambitious politician — somebody who “would cut my head off to carry North Dakota, cut both of your legs off to carry a ward in the Bronx,” as writer Hunter S. Thompson memorably put it.

There was a reason Carter was able to forge the biracial coalition across the South to win the presidency — he was very careful not to offend either constituency.

Jim Free, a Tennessean who made his bones as one of Carter’s congressional liaisons before becoming a Washington lobbyist, recalled hearing the then-governor speak not long after George McGovern’s 49-state loss in 1972.

Carter told an audience of mostly moderate and conservative Southern Democrats that they had to take a pragmatic approach to the next presidential race, and that it would be better to “have partial influence over the winner than total influence over a loser.”

That meant rejecting Democrats who couldn’t win in general elections, whether because they were too far right (Wallace) or too far left (McGovern).

“Ned and I looked at each and other winked,” Free recalled, referring to this then-boss, Tennessee House Speaker (and eventual governor) Ned Ray McWherter. Not that Carter was above courting Wallace. Free worked on Carter’s presidential campaign and recalled the time he spent in Montgomery, sitting in the governor’s office and nudging Wallace during the 1976 general election to actively help Carter in the South. (Wallace would eventually go to, yes, Mississippi to tell whites there it was okay for conservative Democrats to back Carter.)

Carter himself went to Montgomery in June of that year to “express his sincere gratitude” for Wallace’s endorsement.

“Carter was always careful not to rub Wallace’s supporters’ nose in it,” remembered Raines, alluding to Wallace’s defeat at Carter’s hands in the primary.

Because of his bold, and at the time surprising, declaration upon being sworn in as governor in 1971 that “the time for discrimination is over,” it’s easy to forget that Carter had not always had clean hands on racial politics.

After not even making the runoff against segregationist Lester Maddox in Georgia’s 1966 gubernatorial primary, Carter ran more to the right in the Democratic primary of 1970, vowing to invite Wallace to address the state legislature.

Even after his inaugural speech as governor, a prominent TIME magazine cover and hanging Martin Luther King Jr.’s portrait in the Georgia capitol, Carter still faced some skepticism from Black leaders at the outset of his presidential bid, Young recalled.

“The CBC initially didn’t want to meet with him but I insisted and Barbara Jordan got behind me,” said Young, who was in Congress at the time along with Jordan, the legendary Texas Democrat. Carter, Young explained, was seen “as a conservative” by the liberal Black caucus.

What changed was Carter’s defeat of Wallace in the Florida primary, the Southern showdown that would fully render Wallace “an extinct volcano,” as Raines put it.

Carter was careful in Florida — where, as the saying goes, the further north the more Southern it gets — to not alienate whites. As Jonathan Alter recalls in his superb Carter biography, “His Very Best,” the candidate was “an agile straddler.”

Yet when Carter told Floridians “we’ve sent them enough messages, now let’s send them a president” — a play on Wallace’s longstanding send-them-a-message slogan — his appeal was clear.

Wallace had won nearly every Florida county in the 1972 primary. Four years later, Carter beat him by 4 percent statewide and effectively ended the Alabamian’s national career.

Carter was not alone in transforming perceptions of the region. There were his Democratic contemporaries along with moderate Republicans, mostly hailing from mountainous regions with historic Union sympathies: Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, Virginia’s Linwood Holton and North Carolina’s James Holshouser all emerged in the same era and embraced integration.

And there were factors beyond politics. Hank Aaron broke baseball’s monumental home run record for Atlanta’s team in 1974, Bear Bryant integrated University of Alabama football, claiming national titles with Black players, and one of Carter’s favorite bands, Georgia’s The Allman Brothers, featured a Black man on drums.

And figures like Young and Jordan were breaking into elected office across the region, leading a new generation of Black professionals.

“They can hit home runs, lead communities, teach school and be brilliant,” said Nunn, voicing the changing sentiments of white people then.

Then there was Atlanta, the de facto capital of the South but long a more progressive hub that was Carter’s political base. “There is no other Atlanta in the Deep South,” explained the Georgia-reared writer Roy Blount Jr., arguing Carter never could have emerged from Alabama or Mississippi. (It also helped that, because of all the Delta connections at the Atlanta airport, Carter could lure visiting politicians or journalists over the governor’s mansion for a drink anytime they were flying south.)

Perhaps most of all there was, to borrow from Victor Hugo, the power of an idea whose time has come.

“There was segregation fatigue by then,” explained Raines. “And not just among Southern liberals, but middle class [and] even conservative-leaning types, who had accepted integration not only as the law of the land but were tired of all the energy it took to live in a segregated society. As King said, “You can’t keep a man in a ditch without staying down there with him.”

When I spoke to Nunn last week, I asked him if he had distinct memories about the difference from his first Senate bid, in 1972, and his initial reelection six years later, when Carter was in the White House.

He instantly said yes.

To attend a 1972 Chamber of Commerce meeting in Georgia meant to “seldom see a Black face,” said Nunn. “By 1978, there was always a table or two of Black citizens.”

After he landed in Jackson that summer day in 1977, Carter headed toward the Mississippi Delta, the deepest of Deep South in the deepest South of states.

Speaking in Yazoo City about integration, Carter said, “I personally believe it was the best thing that ever happened to the South in my lifetime.”

“At that a big cheer went up from Mississippians, black and white,” Blount recalled in “Crackers,” his book about the South. “A milestone. On July 21, 1977, Desegregation was incorporated into the great Southern heritage of self-congratulation.”