James Earl “Jimmy” Carter Jr., Nobel Prize winner, the 39th President of the United States and the only president from Georgia, has died at age 100 on Sunday, Dec. 29, 2024.
A former peanut farmer from Plains, Ga., Carter rose to political prominence in the early 1960s as a Georgia state senator and later governor of Georgia.
Carter was also a member of the U.S. Navy serving on submarines. The USS Jimmy Carter, a Seawolf-class nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine, is named in his honor.
The mild mannered and deeply religious Carter was elected president in 1976 in the aftermath of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, which led to the first presidential resignation.
Widely considered a “dark horse” candidate, Carter defeated Nixon’s former vice president and successor Gerald Ford, winning the White House by a narrow margin.
During his time in office, the Carter administration created the Department of Energy and Department of Education. Carter also negotiated the Camp David Accords that led to the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979.
However, the 1979 energy crisis and Iran hostage crisis of the same year, where 52 American diplomats and embassy workers were taken hostage during that country’s Islamic revolution, ultimately doomed Carter’s presidency.
Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in the 1980 presidential election in a landslide.
The former president was most known for his humanitarian work after leaving office. In 1982, Carter and his wife Rosalynn founded the Carter Center, a non-profit humanitarian group that focuses on alleviating human suffering around the world, according to the website.
Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 and spent his later years writing 30 books and volunteering with Habitat For Humanity, which builds houses for the needy. Photos from the early 2000’s showed the elderly president on the roof of a house hammering shingles.
Over the past decade, Carter faced many health challenges including brain cancer, but he always bounced by and continued to teach Sunday School regularly at his church well into his 90s.
Augusta resident Patsy McDow shared a commercial plane ride with Carter from Atlanta to San Francisco in 2008 when Carter was on a book tour and says she was surprised at how down-to-Earth the former president was.
“During the flight, he went around and shook hands with everybody and played with the children on board. He was just a very warm and kind man,” McDow said.
He was preceded in death by his wife, Rosalynn, who passed away on Nov. 19, 2023 at the age of 96.
