Jimmy Carter, Memories of Sharecropping, Hoboes, New Deal, and Civil Rights in Rural Georgia

Daddy treated the workers on our farm with meticulous fairness, and Mama’s concern for them was well known.

Jimmy Carter, Memories of Sharecropping, Civil Rights, and Life in Rural Deep South Georgia

What was life like for black and white farmers in rural Georgia during the cash-poor years of the Depression and afterwards? How was the Carter farm able to modestly prosper?

How did sharecropping operate in rural Georgia during the Depression? How was Earl Carter, Jimmy Carter’s father, fairer than many other white landowners? Did his sharecroppers and laborers live a hard life even when with a gracious landowner?

What were the unintended consequences of FDR’s New Deal farm policies early in his Presidency?

How did whites accept increasing black civil rights of blacks in rural Georgia?

THE CARTER FAMILY SHOWING COMPASSION TO THEIR BLACK NEIGHBORS

Jimmy Carter’s family was known for their compassion for their destitute black day laborers and sharecroppers who helped them work their farms near Plains, Georgia during the Depression, when Jimmy Carter was a boy. When his father was on his deathbed, Jimmy was touched by the grief and gratitude shown by their destitute black neighbors.

Even though he was a segregationist, as all Deep South whites were during the Depression, his father, Earl Carter showed deep compassion and fairness in his dealings with his black laborers and sharecroppers. Jimmy remembered: “Daddy knew how much each family earned, how much they owed, what equipment or tools they had, their past record as fieldworkers or sharecroppers, the degree of their industry and ambition, and, of course, their misbehavior on weekends” involving the law.

Jimmy Carter’s mother, Lillian Carter, was a nurse who had many patients. He remembered: “Mama worked as a nurse as much as possible between having children, either” in the hospital but more often as a private nurse. “She earned four dollars a day for twelve hours, or six dollars for twenty hours. This was a lot of money during the Depression.” When any of their destitute black neighbors fell sick, “she never charged them anything for her help, but they would usually bring her what they could afford: a piglet, some chickens, a few dozen eggs, or perhaps blackberries or chestnuts.”

Because she spent so much of her time nursing, Jimmy remembered: “Most of the time we didn’t expect Mama to be at home when we returned from school, but she would usually leave us a note” listing our chores “on a little black table,” “letting us know when she would be back home. Later, my sister Gloria and I would tease Mama by claiming that we always thought the little black table was our real mother.”

Jimmy Carter continued: “Unlike my father, Mama was often inside the tenant houses performing her nursing duties, and she knew about their families, the general status of their health, and their personal sanitary and grooming habits. But I was the one who lived with them, ate at their tables, and participated in their family conversations. The black parents, and especially the women, would talk directly to me about their concerns, and I realized as I grew older that these were messages they hoped I would pass on without their having to speak directly to my parents. I usually found a way to bring up these issues at home when I thought it might help.”[1]

“Daddy treated the workers on our farm with meticulous fairness, and Mama’s concern for them was well known. This gave us an advantage in attracting the best farmers, and I only remember one or two cases when a family voluntarily moved to accommodate a personal need, to take a full-time job with a sawmill, or to move to a larger or better farm.”[2]

Jimmy Carter recalls: “There was an issue that troubled my mother during my political years, when the news media began to probe our family’s history. One day she said to me, “Jimmy, one thing bothers me. Reporters have criticized your daddy lately about not being for racial integration.”

“What they don’t recognize is that he died in 1953, when there was no such thing as integration, and nobody had ever heard of Martin Luther King or any civil rights movement. Your daddy always rejected all the racist organizations that degraded or persecuted black people, and both races always knew him to be fair and helpful. I was real controversial in the community sometimes, but he supported everything I did to help black people and to treat them well.”[3]

We previously reflected on how Jimmy Carter described his transition from plowing with mules to commanding a nuclear submarine in his autobiography, and in the stories we heard in our guided tour of his Presidential Library. Most of these stories we did not repeat in this reflection.

Jimmy Carter’s Youth and Navy Years: From Plowing With Mules to Nuclear Submarines
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/jimmy-carters-youth-and-navy-years-from-plowing-with-mules-to-nuclear-submarines/
https://youtu.be/em5snF_iKkE

Jimmy Carter’s Youth, School Days, and Navy Days: Presidential Library Guided Tour 1 of 4
https://youtu.be/6rO9bh76PRc

SHARECROPPERS AND LABORERS IN RURAL GEORGIA

WEB DuBois in his Souls of Black Folk reflects on the development of sharecropping during Reconstruction. Many of the owners of the ostentatious plantations like that depicted in the movie “Gone With the Wind” faced hard times after the Civil War. No longer could overseers with whips command hundreds of slaves to work the fields of the vast plantations, as the slaves were freed. Plantation houses in the way of Union troops were devastated, and many of the others were abandoned when the owners went bankrupt after the Civil War.

The South was no longer King Cotton as Great Britain started growing cotton in India and other places. Many of the plantations were broken up into smaller farms, but the landowners were cash poor and could not pay the destitute black families who picked the cotton from the former plantation fields. Instead, they arranged to share the profit from the crops with their sharecroppers at harvest time, loaning them enough money to get by.

WEB Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, Essays on Alexander Crummel, Black Episcopal Priest, and Sharecropping
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/web-dubois-souls-of-black-folk-essays-on-alexander-crummel-black-episcopal-priest-and-sharecropping/
https://youtu.be/J3TnQyig6Nk

Especially during the Depression, cash was scarce in rural Georgia, and the landowners often had a hard time making a living, which increased the temptation to cheat their sharecroppers. Jimmy Carter tells us, “Southern farm population increased by 1.3 million between 1930 and 1935, as desperate people lost their jobs in failing factories, left their urban homes, and eventually wound up in places like our community” near Plains, Georgia.

Carter continues: “Throughout the South, and particularly in Southwest Georgia, there had long been a growing dependence by landowners on destitute families who owned little other than their clothes and some cooking utensils who were eager to occupy any vacant shack and to work as day laborers or ‘on shares’ under almost any arrangement. By 1935, families who owned no land worked more than half of Southern farms.” “Even when I left home in 1941 to go to college, the absence of mechanized power, the almost total dependence on manual labor, and the basic agricultural techniques were relatively unchanged since colonial times.”

“For most tenant farmers, permanent poverty was inevitable. Even with high yields, a one-horse family with fifteen acres of cotton would have a gross income of $300 to $400 for the year, and after paying the landlord his share for land use and often the rent of mules and equipment, the tenant would be lucky to keep half of this for a year’s labor for himself, his wife, and his children. The cash draw from the landowner” to pay for his living expenses “for the eight months from preparing the land to harvest would be from $100 to $200, not counting interest. So, net indebtedness was almost inevitable for marginal farmers.” Although day laborers were paid less, they didn’t pay interest on their borrowings.

Jimmy Carter remembered: “The income of small landowners, who cultivated about forty acres, was approximately the same as that of tenants with an operation of the same size. Paying taxes and the full cost of livestock, seed, fertilizer, and other supplies ate up the advantage of not paying rent.”[4]

Carter continues: “Those who did not own land, mules, equipment, or tools other than a hoe and an ax had almost the same lowly status as day laborers and usually worked on halves. The landowner would allot the family as much land as they could work, and usually furnish two mules, a wagon,” plows, “fertilizer, and seed, plus a cabin and a garden plot.” They usually grew cotton and peanuts and could also cut firewood. Typically, they drew about three or four dollars a week for living expenses, which they spent in the owner’s store. “These stores were an important source of income for landowners, who could abuse their tenants by charging unscrupulously high prices and credit charges for the loans and supplies. One study in the South showed that credit and interest charges averaged above twenty-five percent.”

The Carters also had their own store next to their house, but they did not take advantage of their tenants with high prices, as many did. As sharecropping was subject to abuse, many tenant farmers sank deeper in debt every year, and if the landowner cheated them, they had no recourse. They could never sue in a court in the Deep South that disregarded the testimony of blacks.

Jimmy Carter recollects: “Unlike most other landowners around Plains, Daddy disliked this arrangement of working on halves, and traded with more dependable and competent families to work our land. They had their own livestock and equipment and worked on thirds and fourths. In exchange for use of the land, the family allotted one-third of the cash crops and one-fourth of the corn to the landowner.”[5]

“In addition to our home place,” the farm where Jimmy grew up, “we owned another farm in Webster County,” which was a seven-mile drive away. “Day laborers cultivated one of the large fields on the place, and black tenant families worked all the other land.” Since he treated his sharecroppers with kindness, he attracted eight sharecropper families who had saved up to buy their own mules and equipment to work the land. “Only two of the houses were within sight of each other.”

Living in the center was Willis Wright. Jimmy remembered: “Willis was a patriarchal figure on the Webster County Farm. Daddy’s relationship with him was more consultative than instructive.” “Willis was interested, and enough at ease, to question Daddy about market conditions, the relative value or quality of fertilizers and farm equipment, and even political matters. Willis didn’t work on shares, but paid an agreed quantity of cotton and peanuts as rent for the use of our land.”

Willis shocked Earl Carter when he asked to purchase the land. After some delay, he agreed to sell it to him. With his help, Willis was one of the first houses in his area to be wired for electricity early in the 1940s when rural electrification came to Webster County.[6] Years later, when Jimmy Carter inherited the farm, Willis gave him the right of first refusal to buy back their land if, after he passed, his second wife wanted to sell the property, which happened forty years after that.[7]

TRAMPS AND HOBOES DURING THE DEPRESSION

Jimmy Carter recalled: “During some of the worst years of the Depression, the most frequent travelers we saw in front of our house were tramps, some looking out of open boxcar doors as the trains passed, and a far greater number walking down the road, toward either Columbus or Savannah. They were usually men traveling singly, but every now and then an entire family would go by. Even as late as 1938, almost one-fourth of American workers were unemployed, many were put out of jobs by newly mechanized assembly lines in factories.”

Carter continues: “When Mama was home, we never turned away anyone who came to our back door asking for food or a drink of water. Those who showed up were invariably polite, and most of them offered to cut wood or do other yard work in return for a sandwich or some leftover fried chicken or biscuits. We enjoyed talking to them, and learned that many were relatively well-educated and searching for jobs of any kind.”

“One day the lady from the next farm came to visit, and Mama commented on how many tramps she had helped that week. Mrs. Bacon said, ‘Well, I’m thankful that they never come in my yard.’”

Carter recalls: “The next time we had some of the vagrant visitors, Mama asked why they had stopped at our house and not the others. After some hesitation, one of them said, ‘Ma’am, we have a set of symbols that we use, to show the attitude of each family along the road. The post on your mailbox is marked to say that you don’t turn people away or mistreat us.’”

Jimmy Carter remembers that most of the prisoners working on the chain gangs working on the roads were white. Why? He explained, “Except when a death was involved, crimes by one black person against another were not considered very important, and crimes by a black person against a white were very rare. Also, whites were more inclined to take legal cases to the authorities, and were more likely to be guilty of fraud, bad checks, and thefts.” And, often “landowners would intercede with the sheriff and judge to minimize the lost time of a good black worker.”

One of the most cherished jobs for blacks was to work on the railroad section gang, replacing rotten crossties, and driving spikes to hold the rails in place. Though this was hard work, it was steady and well-paying work, and often their sons would inherit their jobs.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF THE NEW DEAL FARM POLICIES

In 1933, when Jimmy Carter was nine years old, and soon after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected, Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act as part of the New Deal legislation. Although the cotton harvest that year was bountiful, a perennial problem was that so many crops were harvested that the prices fell to prices so low that the farmers could not recover their costs.

Jimmy Carter remembers the solution: “The decision in Washington was that a substantial part of the crop would have to be destroyed! Most Southern farmers approved the offer of cash payments at harvest time, equal to the expected net profit per acre, to those who would plow up as much as half their crop.” “More than ten million acres of cotton were destroyed, about one-fourth of the crop, and by fall the price had jumped back up to ten cents a pound.” In addition, “farmers were required to slaughter and burn two hundred thousand young hogs” across the country.

Carter continues: “For some, including my father, these were sacrilegious acts, and a totally unacceptable invasion by the federal government into the private affairs of free Americans. Despite being an otherwise loyal Democrat, he never forgave Roosevelt, nor did he ever vote for him again.”

“The tenancy system remained, with more than half the farms still worked by those who owned none of the land. By 1934, the New Deal programs had increased total farm income in the South, but income from cotton was still only forty-five percent of what it had been in 1929, and few government benefits went to the most needy.”

Government policies encouraged both the decline of the small farm and the rise of mechanized farms on large tracts of land. Jimmy Carter rues: “It was easy for unscrupulous proprietors to force the tenant families from the farm and subsequently receive payment for the portion of the total crop that would not be planted. For many of the poorest farmers, the New Deal had become a curse, not a blessing.” “About a fourth of the tenant families were forced off their farms during the 1930s, and even more after we entered the war in 1941. Fewer Southern families owned automobiles in 1940 than ten years earlier. The farm population was relatively unchanged, and the basic tenant system would continue for two more decades,” until the 1960s. “With little opportunity for off-farm employment, the rural families had nowhere to go to find a better life.”[8] In addition, seasonal farm workers were not covered by the New Deal minimum wage legislation.[9]

CULTURE OF SEGREGATION, CIVIL RIGHTS, AND POLITICS

Jimmy Carter recalled how, during the Depression, many in the South still remembered the post-Civil War Reconstruction era that was less than fifty years in the past. Jimmy Carter recalls: “Many older white Georgians still remembered vividly the anger and embarrassment of their parents, who had to live under the domination of carpetbaggers and their Southern allies, who were known as scalawags.”

The defeated Southerners would always be bitter, Carter remembers: “My mother was the only one in her family who ever spoke up to defend Abraham Lincoln. I don’t remember ever hearing slavery mentioned, only the unwarranted violation of states’ rights and the intrusion of the federal government in the private lives of citizens.”[10]

While WEB DuBois and many other authors describe the dark side of the Jim Crow era when over ten thousand blacks were lynched without legal recourse, history also shows that blacks relied on assistance from progressive whites in their pursuit of civil rights, including educational and workplace opportunities for blacks. During the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, when so many blacks were lynched in the Deep South, Booker T Washington founded the famed Tuskegee Institute and was the leading second-generation black leader. Although this and other black colleges were funded primarily by white industrialists, including Carnegie, in its beginning, Booker T Washington depended on support from local white business and political leaders in Tuskegee, in rural Alabama.

Three Generations of Leading Black Leaders, Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, and WEB Du Bois
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/three-generations-of-leading-black-leaders-frederick-douglass-booker-t-washington-and-web-du-bois/
https://youtu.be/DAEg463i-Tc

Ida B Wells, Journalist, Brave Woman, and Anti-Lynching Activist
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/ida-b-wells-journalist-brave-woman-and-anti-lynching-crusader/
https://youtu.be/sLDHs0AigvY

Up From Slavery: Autobiography of Booker T Washington
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/up-from-slavery-autobiography-of-booker-t-washington/
https://youtu.be/yxDnJ6sBoJc

WEB Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk, Personal Essays From Reconstruction Era
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/web-dubois-souls-of-black-folk-fighting-for-dignity/
https://youtu.be/x212gx1lNIA

While Jimmy’s father, Earl Carter, was a segregationist, he had cordial relations with black community leaders, including Bishop William Decker Johnson. He ran a nearby excellent black school near the St Mark African Methodist Episcopal Church. Bishop Johnson respected the social mores of segregation, while Earl Carter respected his leadership position in his community and his church.

Jimmy Carter recalls: “Bishop Johnson was certainly aware of the racial customs of the day, but he did not consider it appropriate to comply with all of them. It was understood that he could not come to our front door when he wished to talk with my father, but neither would he deign to come to the back.” Instead, “he would arrive in his chauffeured black Packard or Cadillac, park in our front yard, and sound the horn. My father would go outside to the automobile for a conversation, while Bishop Johnson either stayed in the car or came out so the two men could stand together under the shade of a large magnolia tree.”

What was surprising was Jimmy Carter recollecting how his family occasionally visited Bishop Johnson’s church. How many whites would do this in the days of segregation and Jim Crow?

Jimmy Carter recalls: “As a little boy, I was accustomed to the relatively sedate and time-constrained services of our own congregation at Plains Baptist Church, so our family’s visits to St Mark African Methodist Episcopal Church,” near their farm in Archery, “were strange experiences. The small white clapboard building was always overflowing with worshipers and would rock with music and with religious spirit far exceeding anything we ever expected. We knew the words to many of the hymns, but we struggled to keep proper time with the strange, slow rhythms, with syllables often stretched out into words, and words into verses. Soon, however, we would be rocking back and forth in harmony with the swaying bodies of the beautifully dressed choir behind the altar.”[11]

Jimmy Carter’s later interest in civil rights for blacks was influenced by the deep influence of Jack and Rachel Clark, who were the unofficial black overseers of the Carter family farm, second only to his father. His book includes an early photo of Rachel Clark posing with the Carter children, and they helped raise the Carter children. Jimmy Carter remembers: “As the senior couple on the farm, Jack and Rachel Clark were the ultimate arbiters of all disputes that did not warrant my parent’s personal attention. I felt naturally at ease in the homes of the other black families on the farm, especially that of Jack and Rachel Clark.”

This respect was earned by their hard work. “Rachel was famous in the community for her natural ability in the field. She could pick an extraordinary amount of cotton, half again as much as any fieldworker who, at sundown, had a day’s work weighed alongside her.” The Carter children also helped during harvest time of all the crops, working alongside the black laborers.[12]

Jimmy Carter reflects: “One tragic and horrible measure of poverty” during the Depression “was the lynchings that occurred, at least partially because of growing competition even for the least desirable jobs, which in the past had been saved for black workers. As the Depression deepened, an Atlanta organization adopted the slogan, ‘No Jobs for Niggers Until Every White Man Has a Job.’ The number of lynchings in America quadrupled in 1933 over the previous year and remained equally high during the hard times that followed.” Although young Jimmy Carter only heard about one or two such lynchings in his boyhood, he did overhear discussions that mentioned the Ku Klux Klan.[13]

In later years, long after his father Earl had passed away, his mother, Lillian Carter, supported LBJ and the Civil Rights Movement. Jimmy Carter recalls: “In 1964, when Lyndon Johnson decided not to campaign in the Deep South and received just a handful of white votes in our county, Mama volunteered to manage his campaign office. Almost every day, when she returned to her car, she found it covered with graffiti, the windows soaped over, or the radio antenna tied in a knot. Her only compensation was to be a delegate to the national Democratic Convention.”

Later, “after opening a nursing home for some friends in Plains and operating it for a year, she volunteered for the Peace Corps, just asking that she be sent to ‘where people have dark skins and need a nurse’s service.’”[14]

Their former tenant farmer, Willis Wright, was recognized as a leader in his black community, and in the early years of the Civil Rights movement, members of his church decided that he would be the first who would attempt to register to vote in Webster County. He waited for most of the day before the registrar would open his office, and he said he would have to first ask him some questions about citizenship, questions so hard that few whites or blacks could answer them all.

Willis told him, “We discussed this at the church, and the man from the Justice Department said that we no longer have to answer these questions in order to vote. I told the registrar this, and then he pulled a pistol out of a drawer and laid it on the counter. He was nervous, but he said, ‘Nigger, you better think this over for a few more days, then let me know what you decide.’”

Was this an idle threat? It had not been that many years ago when activists encouraging blacks to register to vote in Mississippi had been murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan whose members included the local sheriff. Numerous protestors under the leadership of Martin Luther King seeking voting rights in Selma had been murdered by white Supremacists, and churches and houses of black leaders had been firebombed.

American Civil Rights History: Yale Lecture Notes
http://www.seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/american-civil-rights-history-yale-lecture-notes/
Civil Rights Era, Sixties and Beyond: Yale Lecture Notes
https://youtu.be/GQesHoV5IdI

Martin Luther King, Lunch Counters, Freedom Riders, and Albany, Lewis’ Biography Chapters 4-6
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/martin-luther-king-lunch-counters-freedom-riders-and-albany-lewis-biography-chapters-4-6/
https://youtu.be/_TLt2fQqL4w

Martin Luther King, Birmingham, Nonviolent Protests v Bombs and Brutality, Biography Chapter 7
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/martin-luther-king-birmingham-nonviolent-protests-v-bombs-and-brutality-biography-chapter-7/
https://youtu.be/5y0v0tYMdy8

Martin Luther King, Bloody Struggles in Mississippi and Selma, Lewis’ Biography Chapters 8-9
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/martin-luther-king-bloody-struggles-in-mississippi-and-selma-lewis-biography-chapters-8-9/
https://youtu.be/eMA_7vLYcdM

Willis Wright discussed this with Jimmy Carter, who had recently inherited his daddy’s farm. During this time, the Carter warehouse faced a boycott because of his liberal racial views. Jimmy encouraged Willis and offered to go with him, but Willis declined, saying, “No, sir. It wouldn’t mean nothing if you was there with me.”

When dealing with bullies, the most important rule is this: Show no fear.

Jimmy Carter remembered: “I advised Willis to tell the registrar that he had discussed the matter with me, and that I told him to go back and register. He did so, and the next time I saw him he said he hadn’t had any problem.”

“Times were changing in Georgia, but slowly.”[15]

We were also fascinated by Jimmy Carter’s description of the many crops his father, Earl Carter, grew on his farm, and the many types of livestock he raised. Earl was constantly trying new opportunities to expand the crops and livestock he raised since cotton was such a fickle crop. Since my mother, Lillian Carter, was a nurse, he gained insight into the health challenges of both black and white farmers, as well as livestock. This knowledge of health and hygiene can help everyone, even city dwellers, preserve their health.

Jimmy Carter, Raising Crops and Livestock, and Health and Hygiene, in Rural Georgia During the Depression
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/jimmy-carter-raising-crops-and-livestock-and-health-and-hygiene-in-rural-georgia-during-the-depression/

DISCUSSING THE SOURCES

If you are interested in learning what it was like to live on a farm in rural Georgia during the Depression, and how life was difficult for both the destitute black sharecropper and the landowning white farmer, then I would recommend Jimmy Carter’s book, An Hour Before Daylight, Memories of a Rural Boyhood. This book will transport you back to a different time and place. Unfortunately, the black destitute sharecropper and hired laborer were at the mercy of his white landowner, since he had no legal recourse if he were cheated. But even when the landowner and his family truly cared for him, still his life was hard life.

Jimmy Carter also tells us delightful stories and the history of his grandparents in Plains, Georgia, and the story of his parents’ courtship and early married years. We also did not repeat stories of his church, school, a chapter on Learning About Sin, and how the town of Plains was a busier place in his boyhood. We tried not to repeat too many of the stories Jimmy Carter told us in his autobiography he wrote when he was ninety, or in his Daily Devotions, or that we heard from our guided tour of his Presidential Library, so we encourage you to listen to these videos as well.

Jimmy Carter’s Youth and Navy Years: From Plowing With Mules to Nuclear Submarines
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/jimmy-carters-youth-and-navy-years-from-plowing-with-mules-to-nuclear-submarines/
https://youtu.be/em5snF_iKkE

Jimmy Carter Presidency, then Carter Center, Diplomacy and Charity
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/jimmy-carter-his-presidency-and-founding-the-carter-center/
https://youtu.be/sN3MQevsDa4

Jimmy Carter: Autobiographical, Historical, and Humorous Reflections From His Daily Devotions
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/jimmy-carter-autobiographical-historical-and-humorous-reflections-from-his-daily-devotions/
https://youtu.be/C2LPpDU7udY

Jimmy Carter Inspirational Daily Devotions: Bible Stories, Reflections on Historical Events

Jimmy Carter Inspirational Daily Devotions: Bible Stories, Reflections on Historical Events

https://youtu.be/b24kTvwmuU0

Jimmy Carter’s Youth, School Days, and Navy Days: Presidential Library Guided Tour 1 of 4
https://youtu.be/6rO9bh76PRc

Jimmy Carter, Georgia State Senator & Governor, Running for President: Presidential Library Tour, 2 of 4
https://youtu.be/6rO9bh76PRc

Jimmy Carter, Humble and Diligent President Facing Many Challenges: Presidential Library Tour, 3 of 4
https://youtu.be/GYqBplXHlcw

Jimmy Carter, Founding Carter Center After Presidency: Presidential Library Tour, 4 of 4
https://youtu.be/Z0CNaKpHEAc

There are also vignettes of what Christmas and life was like in rural Plains Georgia, both during the Depression and in the years after his Presidency. We decided to make this a separate video because of the charming story of Jimmy Carter’s favorite Christmas after he left the Presidency.

Jimmy Carter: Christmas in Plains Compared to Christmas in the White House and Afterwards
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/jimmy-carter-christmas-in-plains-compared-to-christmas-in-the-white-house-and-afterwards/
https://youtu.be/C52gRWUTR68

Jimmy Carter also wrote a book on the Virtues of Aging and Retirement.

Jimmy Carter on the Virtues of Aging and Retirement
https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/jimmy-carter-on-the-virtues-of-aging-and-retirement/
https://youtu.be/JozGKCnUyaI

[1] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Memories of a Rural Boyhood (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2001), Chapter 4, My Life As a Young Pup, p. 77, and Chapter 8, Learning More About Life, pp. 196-197.

[2] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 7, Breaking Ground, To Be a Man, p. 183.

[3]Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 11, The Navy Versus Plains, p. 269.

[4] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 1, Land, Farm, and Place, pp. 25-47.

[5] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 2, Sharecropping as a Way of Life, pp. 48-53.

[6] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 7, Breaking Ground, To Be a Man, pp. 182-188.

[7] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 11, The Navy Versus Plains, p. 259.

[8] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 3, Hard Times, and Politics, pp. 59-72.

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Labor_Standards_Act_of_1938

[10] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 1, Land, Farm, and Place, pp. 18.

[11] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 1, Land, Farm, and Place, pp. 22-24.

[12] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 4, My Life As a Young Pup, pp. 75-77.

[13] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 6, Boiled Peanuts in Plains, p. 149.

[14] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 11, The Navy Versus Plains, p. 267.

[15] Jimmy Carter, An Hour Before Daylight, Chapter 11, The Navy Versus Plains, pp. 259-261.

About Bruce Strom 393 Articles
I was born and baptized and confirmed as a Lutheran. I made the mistake of reading works written by Luther, he has a bad habit of writing seemingly brilliant theology, but then every few pages he stops and calls the Pope often very vulgar names, what sort of Christian does that? Currently I am a seeker, studying church history and the writings of the Church Fathers. I am involved in the Catholic divorce ministries in our diocese, and have finished the diocese two-year Catholic Lay Ministry program. Also I took a year of Orthodox off-campus seminary courses. This blog explores the beauty of the Early Church and the writings and history of the Church through the centuries. I am a member of a faith community, for as St Augustine notes in his Confessions, you cannot truly be a Christian unless you worship God in the walls of the Church, unless persecution prevents this. This blog is non-polemical, so I really would rather not reveal my denomination here.

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