Former President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at the age of 100, is being remembered by both admirers and political observers as a progressive southern Democrat and former Georgia governor who pushed for an end to racial injustice in the U.S., and as a beloved humanitarian who worked hard as president and during his post-presidential years to improve the lives of people in need throughout the world.

Carter’s death comes over a year after the passing on Nov. 19, 2023, of former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, his wife and devoted partner of 77 years. Carter also had the distinction of becoming the oldest living former U.S. president after the death at the age of 94 of former President George H.W. Bush on Nov. 30, 2018.

The former president’s passing also follows his decision in February 2023 to receive hospice care at his family home in Plains, Ga., at the age of 98 after declining additional medical intervention to continue treatment of several ailments that required hospitalization over the previous several months.

Modest beginnings

Jimmy Carter was born Oct. 1, 1924, at a hospital in his hometown of Plains, Ga., where he was raised on his parents’ peanut farm. His decades of public service took place after he graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1946 and he began his service as a submariner.

He left the Navy after the death of his father in 1953, taking over the Carter family business in what was then a segregated Georgia with strong lines between Blacks and Whites. He was an early supporter of the nascent civil rights movement and became an activist within the Democratic Party and a leading voice for the change needed to end racial segregation.

Carter was first elected to public office in 1963 as a state senator, for which he served until 1967. He successfully ran for governor in 1970 and served as Georgia governor until 1975, when he turned his attention to a possible run for U.S. president as a progressive southern Democrat.

Many political observers have said although he was relatively unknown outside of Georgia and within the leadership of the Democratic Party, Carter was able to parlay voter fatigue and the public’s response to the Nixon Watergate scandal and the growing opposition to the Vietnam War to establish himself as an outsider candidate removed from scandal and bad policies.

Appearing to answer the nation’s needs at that time, Carter’s slogan at the start of his presidential campaign was, “A Leader, For A Change.” He came out ahead of nine other Democrats, most of them better known than him, to win the 1976 Democratic nomination for president.

The thirty-ninth President of the United States, Carter served from 1977 to 1981 at a time when support for LGBTQ people was in its early stages, with many elected officials remaining cautious about the potential political risk for outwardly embracing “gay rights.”

Yet during his 1976 presidential campaign, Carter surprised some political observers when he stated at a press conference during a campaign trip to San Francisco in May of that year that he would sign the Equality Act, the gay civil rights bill introduced by then U.S. Rep. Bella Abzug (D-N.Y.) if it reached his desk as president.

“I will certainly sign it, because I don’t think it’s right to single out homosexuals for abuse or special harassment,” he said.

While Carter did not back away from that statement, gay activists were disappointed at the time of the Democratic National Convention in New York City in July 1976, when they said convention officials at the request of the Carter campaign refused to include a gay rights plank as part of the Democratic Party’s platform approved at the convention.

Some LGBT Democratic activists attending the convention said they agreed with the contention of Carter supporters that Carter should not be hampered by a controversial issue that could hurt his chances of defeating Republican President Gerald Ford in the November 1976 presidential election.  

Carter narrowly defeated Ford in the election. Some political observers said Ford might have won except for the negative fallout from his decision to pardon former President Richard Nixon, who resigned from office in the midst of the Watergate scandal and allegations that Nixon engaged in illegal activity by playing some role in the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in D.C.’s Watergate office building that triggered the scandal.

In March of 1977, just over two months after Carter was inaugurated as president, the White House hosted an historic, first-of-its-kind meeting with fourteen prominent gay rights leaders from throughout the country. Carter did not attend the meeting and was staying at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., at the time of the meeting, which was organized by presidential assistant for public liaison Margaret “Midge” Costanza. But White House officials said Carter was aware of the meeting and supported efforts by Costanza and other White House staffers to interact with the gay leaders.

“The meeting was a happy milestone on the road to full equality under the law for gay women and men, and we are highly optimistic that it will soon lead to complete fulfilment of President Carter’s pledge to end all forms of Federal discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation,” said Jean O’Leary, then co-executive director of the National Gay Task Force, which helped select the gay activists who attended the meeting. Among those attending was D.C. pioneer gay rights advocate Frank Kameny.

But about one year later in 1978, some LGBT leaders joined famed gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk in criticizing Carter for being slow to speak out against California’s Proposition 6, also known as the Briggs Initiative, a ballot measure asking voters to approve a law to ban gay and lesbian individuals from working in California public schools as teachers or staff members. 

In a June 28, 1978, letter to Carter, Milk called on the president to take a stand against Proposition 6 and speak out more forcefully in support of LGBT rights. “As the President of a nation which includes 15-20 million lesbians and gay men, your leadership is vital and necessary,” Milk wrote.

About four months later,  in a Nov. 4, 1978, campaign speech in support of California Democratic candidates in Sacramento, three days before the Nov. 7 election, Carter spoke out against Proposition 6 and urged voters to defeat it. Others who spoke out against it earlier were former President Ford and then former California GOP Governor Ronald Reagan as well as California’s then Democratic Governor Edmund Jerry Brown.

Voters defeated the proposition by a margin of 58.4 percent to 41.5 percent, with opponents of the anti-gay measure thanking Carter for speaking out against it.

During his presidency Carter helped put in place two new federal cabinet-level agencies – the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. One of the highlights of his presidential years was his role in bringing about the historic Camp David Accords, the peace agreements between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

The initial agreement, signed in September 1978, which led to the first-ever peace treaty between Israel and Egypt one year later in 1979, came about after Carter invited the two Middle East leaders to meet together with him and to begin negotiations at the U.S. presidential retreat at Camp David, Md. Sadat and Begin were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 for their contributions to the historic agreements that were brokered by President Carter.

Despite this and other important achievements, Carter faced multiple setbacks the following year in 1979 related to international developments that political observers say Carter and his advisors failed to address properly. Among them was the revolution in Iran that toppled the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and installed the fundamentalist Islamic regime headed by Ayatollah Khomeini that led to a dramatic drop in Iran’s production and sale of oil. That quickly led to a dramatic rise in the cost of  gasoline for American consumers along with a shortage of gas at fuel pumps leading to long lines as filling stations.

If that were not enough, Carter was hit with the take-over of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979, by militant Iranian youths supported and encouraged by Khomeini who held as hostages 52 U.S. diplomats and American citizens with no sign that they would be released any time soon. As Carter’s poll ratings declined, then U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) announced his candidacy for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination in a rare challenge to an incumbent president.

With all that as a backdrop, gay Democratic activists launched a campaign to elect far more openly gay and lesbian delegates to the 1980 Democratic National Convention than they had in 1976. A record number of just over 100 gay and lesbian delegates emerged from this effort, with many of them pledged to Kennedy. And this time around, the Democratic Party leaders backing Carter at the convention, as well as Carter himself, according to some reports,  expressed support for including a “gay” plank in the party’s platform, which the convention adopted in an historic first.

But when it became clear that Kennedy and California Governor Jerry Brown, who also challenged Carter for the 1980 Democratic nomination, did not have enough delegates to wrest the nomination from Carter, gay activists expressed concern that the Carter campaign was backing away from taking a stronger position in support of gay rights.

Their main concern was that the response by the Carter campaign to a “gay” questionnaire the National Gay Task Force sent to all the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates seeking their party’s nomination in 1980 was significantly less specific than the response by Kennedy and Brown.

Among other things, the activists said the Carter campaign’s response, which was prepared by Carter Campaign Chairperson Robert Strauss, did not make a commitment for Carter to sign an executive order ending the longstanding discrimination against gays and lesbians in federal government agencies, including the military.  The Carter campaign response also did not express support for the national gay rights bill, even though Carter had expressed support for it back in 1976.

Carter supporters, including many in the then gay and lesbian community, pointed out that Straus’s response to the questionnaire expressed overall support for the rights of the gay and lesbian community and a commitment to follow up on that support over the next four years.  Gay Carter supporters also pointed out that Carter would be far more supportive than Ronald Regan, who had captured the 1980 Republican presidential nomination.

Some historians have said that the final straw in dooming Carter’s chances for a second term, in addition to his seeming inability to gain the release of the American hostages held in Iran, was the final televised debate between Carter and Reagan. With most political observers saying Reagan was an infinitely superior television candidate, those observations appeared to be confirmed when Carter’s poll numbers dropped significantly following the final debate.

Although Reagan captured 51.8 percent of the popular vote, with Carter receiving 41.0 percent and independent candidate John Anderson receiving 6.6 percent, Reagan won an Electoral College landslide, with 489 electoral votes compared to 49 for Carter. Reagon won in 44 states, with Carter winning in just 6 states and the District of Columbia.

Carter Center and post-presidential career

Both Carter supporters as well as critics and independent political observers agree that Jimmy Carter’s years after leaving the White House have been filled with years of work dedicated to his passion for the advancement of human rights, peace negotiations, advancing worldwide democracy, and advancing disease prevention and eradication in developing nations.

Most of that work was accomplished through The Carter Center, an Atlanta based nonprofit organization that Carter and wife Rosalynn founded in 1982. Twenty years after its founding, Jimmy Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. The Nobel Committee, among other things, stated it selected Carter for the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

In the years following his presidency Carter also continued to lend support as an ally to the LGBTQ community. During a book tour promoting his book, “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety,” Carter stated in a July 2018 interview with Huff Post Live, that he supported same-sex marriage.

As a long-time self-described born-again Christian, Carter said in the interview, “I think Jesus would approve gay marriage,” adding, “I  think Jesus would encourage any love affair if it was honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else, and I don’t see that gay marriage damages anyone else.”

His expression of support for same-sex marriage came four years after he responded to a question about his thoughts about LGBTQ rights and religion during an appearance at Michigan’s Grand Rapids Community College in 2014.

“I never knew of any word or action of Jesus Christ that discriminated against anyone,” he said. “Discrimination against anyone and depriving them of actual equal rights in the United States is a violation of the basic principles of the Constitution that all of us revere in this country,” Carter stated at the event.