Jimmy Carter’s Legacy as a Champion of Peace, Public Health, and Affordable Housing

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, who tirelessly championed peacekeeping and humanitarian causes after leaving the Oval Office, died on Sunday. He was 100.

Carter’s four-decade legacy in the social sector — work that he undertook with his wife, Rosalynn, who passed away in 2023 — sets him apart from other former presidents. After losing his bid for a second term to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, he established the nonpartisan Carter Center in 1982. In partnership with Emory University, the center, based in Atlanta, promotes peace and public health around the world.

His decades of service at the Carter Center and the housing group Habitat for Humanity earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, marking him as the only U.S. president to win the honor for his work after leaving office.

Born in 1924 to a registered nurse and a peanut farmer, James Earl Carter Jr. came of age in the Jim Crow South. His white, Southern Baptist family lived in a rural area of segregated Georgia that was predominantly Black and poor. Though his father was a segregationist, his mother was a rebel who bucked societal norms, and Carter’s childhood playmates included the Black children of neighboring farming families.

That environment and upbringing shaped his perspective on human and civil rights throughout his career.

“He’s going to be held up as a model for what the ideal post-presidency looks like,” says Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University who specializes in African American politics. “Everyone else’s post-presidency is going to be defined by him.”

Political Priorities

While a student at the U.S. Naval Academy, he met his future wife, Rosalynn Smith, in 1945; they married the following year. The Carters’ marriage spanned 77 years, producing four children, 22 grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and a lifelong partnership working on causes like mental health and global peace.

In 1962, Carter ran for his first state election and won a new seat in the Georgia State Senate. The South was changing dramatically during the Civil Rights Era, and Carter’s stance on race likewise underwent an evolution, says Gillespie.

“There was a time he did not take as courageous a stance on civil rights,” says Gillespie. “That was part of his maturation process, of not being perfect right away.”

In his second bid for Georgia’s governorship in 1970, he ran a dog-whistle campaign during the primaries, promising a return to “law and order” in white communities. Then ahead of the general election, he switched tactics and campaigned doggedly in Black churches to win over skeptical voters, highlighting his Christian faith.

During his swearing-in as governor, Carter cemented his position on race in an inaugural-address pledge that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” The quote landed him on the cover of Time magazine under the headline, “Dixie Whistles a Different Tune.”

“He came to that position a little bit late, but he came sincerely,” says Robert Strong, a professor of politics at Washington and Lee University and a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, an institute of presidential scholarship, political history, and public policy.

Throughout his one term as governor, Carter secured stronger protections for the environment and greater funding for the state’s schools. He backed fair-housing laws and invited civil-rights activists from Georgia into his office, including Coretta Scott King and her father-in-law, Martin Luther King Sr.

Watching the civil-rights movement succeed “made him confident that human rights can work” on an international scale, says Strong. “He thought if we always have it on the table, we can be instruments of change.”

Carter rallied the Black vote across the South in addition to liberal northern states to narrowly defeat the incumbent Republican president Gerald Ford in 1976.

In office, he successfully mediated the Panama Canal treaties, the SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union, diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, and the Camp David Accords to end the war between Israel and Egypt in 1978.

However, an energy crisis, skyrocketing inflation, and the siege of the American embassy in Tehran scuttled his chances for a second term.

After the White House

After losing to Reagan, Carter pivoted to a career outside of elected office. He was only 56 years old when he left Washington to return to his home in Plains, Ga., where he lived the rest of his life.

“All presidents who step down, particularly after losing an election, go through a period of grief. They feel, ‘I’ve met this pinnacle and now I’ve lost it,’” says Strong. “But all of them come to realize, ‘I’m no longer the leader of the Free World, but I still have status. I still have power, and I can choose what to do with it.’”

Recognizing his interest in education, several top academic institutions courted him for the prestige of having a former president teach their students. Emory University made the winning offer in 1982.

The brothers Robert and George Woodruff, who inherited control of the Coca-Cola Company from their father, had given $105 million to Emory three years prior; at that time, it was the largest philanthropic donation ever given to an academic institution.

Flush with cash, Emory sweetened the pot. James Laney, then the university’s president, wooed Carter with the promise he could create a forward-thinking institute that would drive policy and research on his priorities.

The Carter Center

Carter joined Emory in the spring of 1982 as a university distinguished professor. A few months later, he and his wife co-founded the nonprofit Carter Center, committed to advancing human rights and alleviating the suffering of people around the world.

“When he was, as he would say, ‘involuntarily retired’ from the White House, he talked about waking up in the middle of the night, wondering what to do next,” says Paige Alexander, CEO of the Carter Center. “He decided he wanted to create a miniature Camp David, where adversaries could come together and resolve their differences. It gave him purpose, and Mrs. Carter as well.”

The center counted just three employees in the beginning — including the former president. It now boasts 3,500 people on staff worldwide.

The early years of the Carter Center saw him leaning into his strengths as a voice of dignity and peace. He created a new model for post-presidency encore careers: that of the freelance diplomat.

Nearly all of Carter’s successors as president sought his counsel on diplomatic issues. He traveled extensively to regions in active conflict and was a key negotiator during tense disputes between the U.S. State Department and foreign leaders, including Kim Il Sung of North Korea and Fidel Castro of Cuba.

In 1994, Carter was asked to negotiate peace between the Clinton administration and the Haitian government, which was reeling after a military coup to overthrow its president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The center’s seven-year history in Haiti paved the way for Carter to mediate the crisis, secure an agreement to re-install Aristide as president, and avert a U.S. military invasion there.

“Other presidential centers have museums or libraries,” says Alexander. “But very few of them have been as activist as President Carter’s has been.”

The Carter Center’s other successes over the past 40 years include leading a coalition to eradicate Guinea worm disease worldwide, safeguarding 115 democratic elections in 40 countries, and developing new public-health approaches to poorly controlled diseases in Africa and Latin America.

The center has also led efforts to reduce stigma and expand access to treatment for people with mental illness — a personal priority of Rosalynn Carter’s since her days in the White House — and pursue paths to peace throughout Africa, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Haiti, the Korean Peninsula, and the Middle East. Rosalynn Carter died on November 19, 2023, at age 96.

The center’s Board of Trustees is a team of the couple’s close personal advisers who are familiar with their thinking on complex issues. Alexander says she was chosen to lead the organization in 2020 in part for her dedication to the former president’s vision.

“The grilling he put me through when he brought me on was his insurance policy,” she says with a laugh.

Habitat for Humanity

Carter was out for a jog in New York’s Lower East Side one morning in the early 1980s when he passed by a group of young volunteers from Habitat for Humanity, an Atlanta-based charity that builds and renovates houses for people in need. He had known other Habitat volunteers through his church in Plains, but had never become involved himself.

He took it as a sign, and in 1984, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter hopped on a bus from Georgia to New York and officially joined Habitat to renovate 19 apartments inside the historic but dilapidated Mascot Flats tenement building in the East Village. They returned a year later to finish the job. It kicked off 35 years of the couple’s hands-on service as construction volunteers and fundraisers at Habitat.

Carter joined its board around that time and conducted joint fundraising efforts between the Carter Center and Habitat.

“He put Habitat on the map. No one had ever seen a former president of the United States sleeping in a church basement,” says Jonathan Reckford, CEO of Habitat for Humanity. “He felt it was him putting his faith into action in a tangible way.”

Habitat hosts an annual week-long event, dubbed the Carter Work Project, where volunteers convene to improve low-cost housing in a single neighborhood. A skilled woodworker, Jimmy Carter liked doing carpentry. Rosalynn Carter would paint walls. Habitat’s staff and volunteers often jockeyed for the opportunity to work side-by-side with the former first couple.

“It’s not a competition as long as the Carters’ house gets finished first,” jokes Reckford.

The couple were active participants in the Carter Work Project home builds up until 2019, when the former president and first lady put on their hard hats for the final time to help build 21 residences in Nashville.

Habitat plans to continue the Carter Work Project into the future. To celebrate Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday on October 1, 2024, Habitat built 30 homes in St. Paul, Minnesota, in his honor. The country-music singers Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood — who had volunteered alongside the Carters for decades, dating back to projects following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — led the star-studded event.

Reckford says it is hard to overstate how much Carter’s time and attention has meant to the organization — not just in driving donations and name recognition, but his personal touch with Habitat’s volunteers over the years.

Once, when sleeping in a church, Carter learned a newlywed couple had given up their honeymoon to work on the build. Reckford says Carter handed over the church’s Sunday School room to them for privacy.

“Can you imagine another former president doing that?” Reckford said.

‘A Legacy of Service’

Carter proved to be more popular with the American people for his humanitarian work than he was during his single term as president, but Strong says there exists a through-line of decency.

“He was a Sunday School teacher. He was a doer of good deeds. He would say and do controversial things,” he says. “The Jimmy Carter they like, that’s exactly the same person he was in the White House. He did what he thought was right.”

Gillespie adds, “His was a legacy of service that is rooted in his strong Christian faith.”

Carter wrote more than 30 books, including several memoirs and calls for diplomacy. His books Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid and We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land explored his proposed solutions to the decades of conflict in the Middle East.

“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children,” said Carter in concluding his 2002 Peace Prize acceptance lecture. “The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices.”

M.J. Prest (The Chronicle of Philanthropy)