By David Hatchett
NABJ Black News & Views
https://blacknewsandviews.com/
To most Americans, Sunday’s passing of former President James Earl “Jimmy” Carter at age 100 brings to mind a decent man whose term in the White House was marred by his inability to overcome the high unemployment and inflation of the 1970s, and the seizure of American hostages by Iranian students. Others remember Carter for winning the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for helping to resolve conflicts around the world.
But for Black Americans, Carter was a study in contrasts. From one angle, his Black appointments and policies toward Africa were among the most effective of any president.
In March 1978, Carter’s visit to Nigeria made him the first U.S. president to visit a sub-Saharan African country. Carter also persuaded Congress to ban the importation of chrome from white-minority dominated Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and impose additional sanctions on white-minority controlled South Africa.
As part of his human rights-based foreign policy, Carter named former Martin Luther King Jr. aide Andrew Young as United Nations ambassador. When South Africa illegally occupied neighboring Namibia, which was wracked by a violent Black insurgency, Young and Vance helped craft a peace proposal in 1978 that helped lead to Namibian independence in 1990. Young also helped improve America’s image in Africa.
Domestically, Carter greatly increased the number of Black people in senior-level positions in the federal bureaucracy. These included Howard University alumnae Patricia Harris heading Housing and Urban Development and Eleanor Holmes Norton taking over the Equal Educational Opportunity Commission.
Carter’s Black appointments and progressive policies toward Africa stand in sharp contrast, however, to his segregated beginnings. He was born in Plains, Georgia, in 1924. Carter said his Black playmates went to different schools and churches from him. Save for the family’s domestic help, the president’s father would not allow African Americans into their home.
Carter got accepted to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1946. After he graduated, Carter was assigned to the Navy’s elite nuclear submarine force under Admiral Hyman Rickover.
In 1953, the death of Carter’s father brought him back to Plains, where he took over the family’s peanut business. He quickly became a mainstay of the community. In 1961, Carter was elected to the local school board and the state senate the following year.
In 1965 the former Navy officer ran for governor. He tried to appeal to Black people and urban white people. But he would not allow himself to be categorized as a liberal or conservative. He said he was the voters’ best choice because his Democratic primary opponents had “too many people against them.” Rabidly anti-integration Atlanta restaurateur Lester Maddox, however, won the primary and the general election.
In 1970, Carter ran for governor again–this time clearly aiming for support from the right. His campaign mimicked that of arch segregationist George Wallace, who was elected governor of neighboring Alabama that year. Carter also supported the private schools white Georgians had established to evade school integration.
Carter got few Black votes. But he defeated the more moderate former Gov. Carl Sanders in the Democratic primary and went on to win the general election.
Once in office, however, Carter reversed again and embraced Black Americans. The number of Black people placed on state governing boards and in state agencies, for example, grew from three to 53 during Carter’s time in the governor’s mansion. In what may have been a brow-raising act for many non-Southern governors of the period, Carter had Martin Luther King’s portrait hung in the Georgia State House. And by the time he left office in 1974, Carter had become very popular among Georgia’s Black constituents. This included Andrew Young and Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther “Daddy” King Sr. — Martin Luther King Jr’s widow and father respectively.
The little-known former Georgia governor made what was initially seen as a longshot run for the White House in 1976. But Carter won more than half of the Democratic primaries and went on to capture the Democratic presidential nomination. Much of this was because of his domination of the Black vote. Black voters fueled Carter’s triumphs in Florida, North Carolina, and other key states whose losses could have cost the former Georgia governor the nomination. Carter appealed to Black Americans through his familiarity with Black churches and culture, and ties to Andrew Young and Coretta Scott King.
In the general election, Carter bested Republican nominee Gerald Ford by just 1.7 million popular votes and 57 electoral votes. But Carter’s Black voter support pushed him over the top in 13 states and carried him to the White House.
Black Americans were elated. But 27 percent of them lived below the poverty line. And Black leaders wanted a major expansion of the government’s antipoverty efforts in addition to black Carter’s appointments and liberal Africa policies.
But the economy was in a recession and the generally fiscally moderate Carter made fighting inflation his primary objective and he refused to implement any new large scale federal social welfare initiatives. Carter’s 1980 budget, for instance, increased defense spending and cut expenditures on food stamps and other social service measures that disproportionately impacted Black Americans. Andrew Young was also forced to resign as U.N. ambassador in 1979 after he had an unauthorized meeting with a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Black leaders were aghast. As early as August 1977, Bayard Rustin, Jesse Jackson and several other Black leaders met and declared that Carter had “betrayed” black Americans. They called his policies toward them “callout neglect.” NAACP head Benjamin Hooks and the Urban League’s Vernon Jordan even discussed supporting the Republicans.
But in the 1980 election, Black people’s deep-seated anxiety about Ronald Reagan, Carter’s right-wing Republican opponent, resulted in them casting 83 percent of their ballots for the former Georgia governor in his unsuccessful re-election effort.
Carter’s up-and-down relationship with Black Americans continued after he left the White House. When Jesse Jackson visited Carter in Plains in the summer of 1983, the former president encouraged Jackson to run for the presidency. But after the 1984 presidential election, Carter attended an Atlanta reception for the newly formed Democratic Leadership Council, which raised $60,000. The new group wanted to steer the Democrats away from large expenditures on social welfare programs and Black people and other special-interest groups toward middle-class whitepeople.
David Hatchett is a former professor at Medgar Evers College in New York City and author of the forth-coming book “Riding the Donkey: The Democratic Party and African Americans.”
