To most Americans, the passing of former President James Earl “Jimmy” Carter 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 in 1979. Others remember Carter salvaging much of his legacy by winning the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for helping to resolve conflicts around the world.
But for African Americans, Carter was a study in contrasts. It could be argued that his greatest successes were in Africa. When Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, he made Henry Kissinger his national security advisor. Kissinger’s military aide was Army Colonel Alexander Haig. In his book The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, journalist Seymour Hersh wrote that prior to National Security Council discussions of African issues, “Haig would begin to beat his hands on the table, as if he was pounding a tom-tom” drum. Hersh also said Haig would jokingly describe Blacks as apes. These fell under the realm of Haig’s “Tarzan jokes.”
Hersh also wrote that after an early 1970 trip to Africa by Secretary of State William Rogers received good publicity, Nixon told Kissinger to relegate the “niggers” to Rogers and Nixon and Kissinger would cover “the rest of the world.”
All that changed when Carter took up residence in the White House. In March 1978, his visit to Nigeria made him the first American president to visit a sub-Saharan African country. Carter also got Congress to ban the importation of chrome from white-minority dominated Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and impose additional sanctions on racially segregated, white-ruled South Africa.
As part of his human rights-based foreign policy, Carter named former Martin Luther King Jr. aide Andrew Young as ambassador to the United Nations. When South Africa illegally occupied neighboring Namibia, which was wracked by a violent Black insurgency, Young and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance crafted a peace proposal in 1978 that helped lead to Namibian independence in 1990. Young also improved America’s image in Africa.
Domestically, Carter appointed more Black judges than all the previous presidents put together. He vastly increased the number of Blacks in senior-level positions in the federal bureaucracy. These included former ambassador to Luxembourg and Howard Law School Dean Patricia Harris taking over the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, while Eleanor Holmes Norton was made the director of 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, Ga. 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 Naval Academy 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 his family’s peanut business. He quickly became a mainstay of the community. In 1961, Carter got elected to the local school board and the state senate the following year.
In 1966, the former Navy officer ran for governor. He tried to appeal to Blacks and urban whites, 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.” A rabid anti integration Atlanta restaurateur named Lester Maddox, however, won the primary and the general election.
Carter ran for governor again in 1970, this time from the right. His campaign mimicked that of arch segregationist George Wallace who was elected governor of neighboring Alabama that year. Carter said if he were elected, he would invite Wallace to visit Georgia. 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 Governor Carl Sanders in the Democratic primary and went on to win the general election.
Once in office, however, Carter reversed the field again and embraced African Americans. The number of Blacks on state governing boards and in state agencies for example, grew from three to 53 during Carter’s time in the governor’s mansion. He had a portrait of King hung in the state capital. And by the time he left office in 1974, Carter had become popular among Georgia Blacks.
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. Carter appealed to African Americans through his connections with Black churches, and culture and ties to Young and Coretta Scott King.
In the general election, Carter bested Republican nominee Gerald Ford by just 1.8 million popular and 56 electoral votes. But Carter capturing over 90% of the Black vote pushed him over the top in 13 states and carried him to the White House. African Americans were elated. But 31% of them lived below the poverty line. And Black leaders wanted a major expansion of the government’s antipoverty efforts, such as the passage of the Humphrey-Hawkings Full Employment bill, in addition to 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. As a result, 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 African Americans. 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 African-American leaders had declared that Carter had “betrayed” Blacks. They called his policies toward them “callout neglect.” Over the next three years, NAACP Executive Director Benjamin Hooks and the Urban League’s Executive Director Vernon Jordan even discussed supporting the Republicans, and the Congressional Black Caucus did not endorse Carter in 1980.
But when the ballots were counted in 1980, deep-seated Black anxiety about Ronald Reagan, Carter’s right-wing Republican opponent, resulted in 83% of African Americans casting their ballots for Carter in his unsuccessful re-election effort.
Carter’s up and down relationship with African Americans continued after he left the White House. When Jesse Jackson visited Carter in the summer of 1983, Carter encouraged him to run for the presidency. But after the 1984 presidential election, Carter attended an Atlanta reception for the Democratic Leadership Council. The group wanted the Democrats to move away from large scale expenditures on social welfare programs and Blacks and other “special interests” and toward middle class whites.
David Hatchett is a former professor at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, and the author of the forth-coming book "Riding the Donkey: The Democratic Party and African Americans."
