Carter was called the same racial epithet when he took over his family’s peanut farm in South Georgia during the Jim Crow era. He repeatedly refused to join a segregationist group called the White Citizens’ Council despite threats to boycott his peanut business. A delegation representing the council confronted Carter at his warehouse one day, with one member even offering to pay his five-dollar membership fee.
“As one of his biographers has noted, Carter was so angry that he walked over to his cash register, pulled out a five-dollar bill, and declared: “I’ll take this and flush it down the toilet, but I am not going to join the White Citizens’ Council.”
I sometimes feel that Jimmy Carter is the president America didn’t actually deserve, but who in any case made so much more of his life before and after the presidency. Carter is decidedly before my time, as a chief executive, and mostly what he did to directly impact me was usher in the Reagan era of Everything Gets Worse. But I will be genuinely sad when he dies. Not just because he was a nuclear submariner, even, although also that of course. He just seems to be a sincere and well-meaning person with a desire to do good in the world, and I miss the idea that this is a thing we could expect of our leaders.
(…You know. There are things I miss about Twitter. A thing I will not miss is, when he dies, having “reminder that your ‘hero’ Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to Nauru once backed the counterrevolutionary Liberationist People’s Socialist Popular Front and called the Popular Front of Socialist People’s Liberation a terrorist organization, just thought you should know” shoved into my timeline by some 17-year-old as Serious Discourse™, always the most exhausting part of leftist social media)