Jimmy Carter: Segregationist

The conventional wisdom surrounding Jimmy Carter is reflected in both academia and the media. This perception is personified by what many Americans will first encounter when they read about Jimmy Carter on Wikipedia:

Unfortunately for the citizens of Georgia, this conventional wisdom is a myth. The true story of Carter's rise to power is rooted in segregationist policies and alliances, a stark contrast to the progressive image often portrayed. The reality is that Carter's political ascent was built on maintaining the status quo of racial division and even attempting to expand it, a truth that has been conveniently overlooked or ignored.

Jimmy Carter’s political ascendancy and maneuvering mirrors the Democratic Party’s relationship with racial segregation, the South, and political power from the 1950s through the 1980s. Carter is virtually ignored by historians who write about the “Party Switch” despite Carter being a central figure in the Democratic Party throughout the 1970s. 

James “Jimmy” Earl Carter, Jr., the eighth-generation Georgian, was born in Plains, a small town in southwest Georgia's Sumter County, on October 1, 1924. His father, Mister Earl, a World War I veteran, ran the family agricultural business and was a prominent figure in the county. His influence extended to the Sumter County School Board and the Plains Baptist Church. He served on the local Rural Electrification Administration board and was an elected State Representative. Mister Earl was also close personal friends with influential Georgia Democrats including Governor Herman Talmadge, who would stay at the Carter house when he was in town.¹

William Alton Carter was Jimmy’s “Uncle Buddy,” and was first elected to the Plains City Council in 1918 and then mayor for 28 years.²

Marketed as a humble peanut farmer from the rural South, Jimmy Carter was also projected as a Southern John F. Kennedy and leader of the progressive “New South.”³ After serving in the Navy for ten years, Carter returned home to expand his family business and continue his father's political career. In 1955, he was appointed to the Sumter County School Board—replacing his recently deceased father.⁴ Jimmy Carter would go on to chair the school board and serve on many other local boards and committees. Though he lost the 1962 State Senate primary election,⁵ he challenged the results as fraudulent in court and won the subsequent election with fraudulence of his own.⁶ He briefly positioned himself to run for the 3rd congressional district but then set his sights on the Governor's race, which he lost in 1966.⁷ However, he ran again for Governor in 1970 and won.⁸ In 1974, Carter was the Chairman of the National Democratic Campaign Committee.⁹ In 1976, he defeated Gerald Ford to become President of the United States,¹⁰ serving one term before losing to Ronald Reagan in 1980.¹¹

Despite his humble public persona, Carter was one of the wealthiest and largest landowners in Sumter County due to the Carter family business, which Jimmy operated until he ran for governor.¹² Before running for President, Carter owned 91% of the 2,000-acre agriculture business, with an annual gross income equal to $14,000,000 in 2024 dollars.¹³

When Carter returned home from the Navy he began making a presence in the Plains community as he built a new home for his growing family and started to get involved in community organizations.¹⁴ Carter joined the Lions Club of Plains, where he spearheaded a community project for the club—a new public swimming pool. The pool, perhaps coincidentally, was built just around the corner from Carter’s new home, and this Carter-driven pool project also happened to be whites-only.¹⁵

Less than a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Jimmy Carter accepted an appointment to fill his father's seat on the Sumter County Board of Education in 1955.

These seven years, until he ran for State Senate, marked Carter's first political experience, a chapter either vaguely referenced or often completely omitted from histories and presidential timelines, likely due to the scarcity of records and details.

Politicians, particularly those with presidential aspirations, typically maintain thorough records of their public political life. It's unclear why there's limited information on Carter's initial decade in politics, including at his Presidential library. A potential reason could be that Carter was a Board Member and Chair of a deeply segregationist school system that operated in open defiance and noncompliance with the Brown v. Board ruling for the entirety of Carter’s tenure. The records of these pivotal years during the civil rights movement that have been uncovered do not speak well of Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter’s first resolution as a board member, and likely his first elected or appointed public political act, was to use lower-than-expected black enrollment as an opportunity to reallocate already unequal resources from black schools to white ones. The Carter resolution asked the Georgia Department of Education to reallocate funds intended for new black schools, “to another project, or building, for the purpose of answering the needs of the white high school pupils of Sumter County, since these rooms are not needed in the negro schools.”¹⁶

That same year Carter proposed another initiative to the segregationist school board. White parents had complained about a new black elementary school being located too close to their children's school, leading to situations where white and black children would have to walk alongside each other. To address this issue, Carter suggested moving the proposed black school to a different location and promised to "minimize simultaneous traffic" between white and black students.¹⁷

Decades later the ACLU would cite this exact resolution from Carter in 1956 as evidence of forced segregation in Sumter County Georgia. Carter’s press secretary was asked to comment, and the New York Times reported that he dismissed the topic as an “old story.”¹⁸