As I deal with the challenges of getting old, which in my case involves a stroke, I am less drawn to writing memorials. I used to focus on the memorializing of famous people who have influenced my life in some way. But I guess that aging has meant that these influences are more in the past for me as well as for them. The future is more for younger people than it is for me.
How can I turn this around: Either I continue to think of myself in the future rather than in the past, or I think of my own memories of these memorable people to be of value to anyone who listens to me! In any case, I do have someone in mind whose presence in my life stands out even more today than in the past. And that is Jessie Jackson.
What is more to the point, he only passed away in February, less that a month ago. So I am inspired to include my memories of him in this collection of memorials. Maybe it will be my last such memorial. But then as I look at my last such memorial, I discover that I had missed another person who had an even more important role in my life and who passed away in 2024, just when I was initially recovering from my stroke. Non other than Jimmy Carter!
And as I researched his memorials for my own, I realized that I should also memorialize his wife, Rosalyn Carter, who died in 2023. I hardly knew her, but my search for memories of her husband included references to her that showed how influential she was in his life. They include my own memories of him that I realise now were memories that included the dynamics of their lives together.
But I will go backwards in time for these three, startling with Jessie Jackson, then Jimmy Carter, and then his wife Rosalyn. All three were from the same part of the US. But that simply shows that all three were part of the same cause of equality that inspires me. In part, that is because it is very much a part of Southern history. Of course, equality is a bigger problem than that, especially as the country has become more diverse but also more attuned to other challenges to equality.
I start with Jessie Jackson because his particular view of this concern is a continuation of race and other forms of inequality. But also because of the viewpoint that I associate with Mahatma Gandhi. That is the philosophy of non-violent resistance that was so central to the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King. Of course I new that Jessie Jackson was one of King’s inner circle and had been with him when he was assassinated in Tennessee. But I didn’t know that he is viewed by many as that succeeded to King.
Jesse Jackson
Actually, the situation was a bid more complicated than that. Ralph David Abernathy was officially appointed as the head of Martin Luther Kine’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) after King’s death in 1968. Although Jessie continued for awhile as the leader of Operation Breadbasket, which was part of this movement, Jessie started his own organisation called People United to Serve Humanity (or Operation PUSH) in 1971. He subsequently established the Rainbow Coalition in 1984. Eventually, these two organisations were merged, and continued to support blacks but also other groups, including LGBT rights.
In his first ran for President in 1984, Jesse Jackson came in third among Democrats (a significant accomplishment since some 19 candidates were running). And when he ran again in 1988, he actually came in second. He was the first black candidate to be taken so seriously for this office, although he was not the first, since Shirley Chisholm, a prominent black woman in Congress, had ran in 1972. Jackson continued to be actively politically throughout the subsequent years of his life, including in several international settings as well as being active in LGBT and civil rights in the States.
I met Jessie Jackson in 1990 when he organized a meeting at Arnold and Porter, a major law firm in Washington, DC which had AT&T as a client. The meeting was clearly intended to recruit AT&T for a key role in the civil rights movement. I was working in AT&T’s Washington office as the person responsible for social policies. I was also their lead person for working on these issues with the Business Roundtable, a powerful business association for big business. The head of AT&T oversaw human rights issues there. I had also been asked to respond to a letter to the head of AT&T from the NAACP, whose chairman at the time was someone I knew from North Carolina. So it was already clear to me that the civil rights community wanted AT&T to back some important civil rights legislation in Congress.
I went with my AT&T bosses to this meeting at Arnold and Porter. I remember that Jessie Jackson was there with a team of others from his organisation. The team from Arnold and Porter included Vernon Jordan, who had been the head of the National Urban League, a major business association for blacks, whom I had met before. The main objective of the meeting was to convince AT&T to move the Business Roundtable to support the bill and thereby to divine the business community, if not to persuade other parts of the business community to support the bill.
Fortunately my bosses decided to support me. We were able to get two other companies to work with AT&T at the Business Roundtable. I then organised a meeting in New York with the three CEOs of these companies to meet with the leaders of several civil rights and women’s rights groups, and we were on the way.
Washington representatives from all these groups then met as a working group on a weekly basis through the spring and early summer of 1991. The Business Roundtable hired a lawyer to work with us. We started with the Senate where we worked with two Republican members on the committee charged with handling the bill. As I recall, the Democrat chairman on the Committee was Ted Kennedy, but the Business Roundtable was ideally in position to mobilize Republicans. However, we did work directly with the Democratic Speaker of the House at large to get the support we needed there. Unfortunately, the Business Roundtable withdrew from the bill before it got to the House.
I know that the bill that eventually passed was essentially the version that we had worked out in that working group, supported by the Republican staffer who had worked on it in the Senate. But, by this time, the Republican President had jumped in to block the deal that we had worked out. The President’s chief lawyer called my CEO in New York and told him to back opp. I recall the Speaker of the House continued to urge us to stay in. But the Democratic chairman of the House committee that controlled the future of the telephone business disagreed with the Speaker and argued that AT&T needed to stay out of the civil rights issue. So we encountered resistance from both sides, Democrats and Republicans. My CEO called the political world a “three-ring circus” and pulled the company (and the Business Roundtable) out of the deal.
Today, these same big businesses are being pressured by Trump to drop the very basis of equal rights that this country stands for. But I recall that the Business Roundtable did adopt a policy more recently that calls for its members to support multiple interests besides the interest of investors. Where would Jessie Jackson and his National Rainbow Coalition be now? Well, this is 35 years later, and Jessie Jackson is no longer with us.
His memorial service in Chicago in early March of 2026 was an informative display of his origins in the Black culture of America. Al Sharpton was the most memorable of Black speakers, but there were several others, many of them ministers. And the singers, both famous individuals and groups, were heard throughout the ceremony. But the event also reinforcing his commitment to the political world – former President Obama most of all spoke to a receptive crowd but also former Presidents Clinton and Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. And speakers from his Rainbow Coalition also including the President of Colombia in Spanish and an unusually articulate Arab American who spoke about his outreach to people around the world. Jackson remained active in American and international politics until the illness that was originally considered in 2017 to be cerebral palsy but subsequently as something worse by the time he died in 2026.
Jimmy Carter
I was a White House Fellow when Jimmy Carter was President in 1979 and 1980. Although I know that Jessie Jackson supported Jimmy Carter, I think that Carter was more of a centrist than Jackson. Carter did not even support the Democratic candidate for President, George McGovern, in 1972; he even aligned with George Wallace on a number of issues while he was governor. Jessie Jackson reportedly said that Carter couldn’t win in Georgia without having support from racists. I realize that sometimes one has to relate to different people in different ways, while also staying true to yourself. In my case, unlike Jimmy Carter, it meant that my political career in North Carolina was limited. I ran for the state senate three times, in 1974, 1976 and 1978. Carter, on the other hand, was a state senator from 1962 but then went on to become Governor of Georgia in 1966 and 1970 and then President of the U.S. in 1976.
I had moved to North Carolina in 1966. My first presidential campaign was in 1968 and of course I voted for Hubert Humphrey. Wallace ran as a third party candidate that year, capturing the votes of many Southern Democrats, including in the district where I voted. I don’t who Carter voter for that year, but I suspect it wasn’t for Humphrey. And unlike Carter, I then voted for McGovern in 1972 when the district meant for Nixon. The whole South went with the Republican that year, but so did the rest of the country except Massachusetts (1972).
Of course, I voted for Carter in 1976. Carter’s ability to win the Presidential election that year largely depended on his getting the Southern vote back to the Democrats, especially since the whole West went Republican. But then he lost it in 1980, carrying only his state in the South. Perhaps it was because Carter no longer worked on getting the racist vote in the South in 1980. Suffice it to say that the southern racist vote has gone to Republican presidential candidates ever since then. So Carter’s wining in 1976 was an aberration.
It is true, of course, that Bill Clinton was also a Southern Democratic governor before being elected as a Democratic presidential candidate in 1992 and 1996. And he did carry a few Southern states, including his home state of Arkansas, but not the central core of the South that includes North Carolina. Georgia did vote for Clinton in 1992 but not in 1996. And Clinton actually rejected Carter, perhaps because of their different wining strategies. It seems that he even dismissed Carter as a renegade.
In any case, that core of the South remains as loyal now to Republicans as it was to the Democrats after the Civil War – and into the 1960s and 1970s. The shift to Republicans started at the presidential level but extends from there to state and local politics, too. So my three terms in the NC state senate were facilitated by a combination of old and new Democrats in the 1970s that no longer exists today.
My district is now overwhelmingly Republican – except for the Blacks who were part of the new Democratic party but are now in a separately voting unit with other Blacks. But that also includes another change, since I was elected in a multi-member district that included Blacks who supported me, even though I was White. Now, all districts are single-member districts. And now, the Senate – and House – have become as solidly Republican as they had been solidly Democratic back when I served in the Senate. But it also means that the racist core of Southern old Democrats has become part of the Republican party, while Blacks have elected Black Democratic candidates.
I did work for Carter’s campaign in 1980 and supported Walter Mondale in 1984. But I was picked as a White House Fellow in 1979. I was still living in North Carolina, but I saw the fellowship as an opportunity to move on in my career. I chose a fellowship position that would give me new possibilities. I was offered a position with the CIA, but I had already turned them down at Oberlin. I was also offered a position with the organisation managing the domestic version of the Peace Corp but decided it was too much life what I had been doing.
Of course, I had wanted a position with the Foreign Service but was beaten by a Catholic priest in my class, with solid East European connections or at the White House itself but was beaten there by a Hispanic American in my class, with a business background. So I chose to go with the head of the public service to learn more about employment and labor relations in a large public institution. The experience helped me to get both the job at AT&T and the job later with the ILO. When I took this position, Carter’s major accomplishment in public employment had already passed in the Congress, but I was involved with several aspects of implementing the new law. It is a law that the current administration has eliminated big time.
But it seems that the current administration is trying to eliminate almost all of what Carter accomplished. The Panama Canal Treaty, for example, and the arms control treaty with Russia, have been opposed by Trump. Also the various climate treaties that even Nixon supported. He has even removed the solar panels that Carter put up on the White House roof. Carter also created the Education department that Trump has abolished and the Energy department that he has completely changed. One could go one and one.
One cannot ignore the Middle East, of correct. The disaster of the hostage crises, in my perception, was what ended Carter’s chances for a second term, above and beyond his reliance on old Southern democrats when he himself was not a racist. The internal polls that I saw during the weekend before the 1980 election showed him winning until the very end. Others put the blame on other factors, such as the gas crisis or inflation, but I am convinced that he would have won if he had resolved the hostage crisis before the election. Of course, there is the argument that Iran would never have agreed to negotiate with Carter. So perhaps it wasn’t even an option in the first place.
But then there is the agreement that Carter reached with Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel at Camp David. I suppose that even that was complicated by the refusal of Israel to accept a Palestinian state. But our class has benefit both from a trip to Egypt and Israel during our fellowship year and a trip to the Panama Canal some yeas later when one of our classmates was the American Ambassador there. We are supportive of both deals.
Anyway, my memories of Jimmy Carter are mostly associated with the fellowship year during his term as President. But there are also some memories from his time after that. He is the president with the longest time alive after his presidency. He spent that time doing several different things, including resolving conflicts around the world, fighting unusual diseases in Africa, and building homes in poor neighborhoods in the US and elsewhere. He and his wife formed the Carter Center in Atlanta and were active with Habitat for Humanity, where he was able to use his skills building cabinets and such. I have only been to the Center twice and was never participated in any of his activities there or at his church in Plains, Georgia. But I continue to be impressed by his accomplishments for which he received the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.
Carter died on December 29, 2024, following nearly two years in hospice care. Memorial services and state funerals were held in Atlanta from January 4 to 7, then in Washington DC from January 7 to 9, and culminating with a service at his home church and a private burial in his hometown of Plains. The biggest event was the state funeral at the Washington National Cathedral on January 9. It was also televised. My son PJ and his wife Sarah went to this funeral. I watched the whole event at home in France but missed them. It was a large crowd.
I do remember some highlights of the event. In addition to various children and grandchildren of Carter, I was impressed with the other individuals who were on the program. I was especially struck by the appearance of Andrew Young who spoke both as a religious leader and as a personal friend. Both Walter Mondale and Gerald Ford were represented by sons, plus one Carter’s presidential administer rations Stuart E. Eizenstat. And of course President Biden delivered the official eulogy.
Rosalynn Carter
Jimmy Carter’s wife Rosalynn passed away on November 19, 2023. Her time in hospice care was only 2 days, but she died while Jimmy was still in his own longer period in hospice care. She died 13 months before him but 7 months after he had been so limited. He was in a hospital bed to attend her funeral in Atlanta, at the Glenn Methodism Church at Emory University. He did not speak but was well represented by a son and a grandson. Of course, it was a major event that all the living first ladies attended, including two of their husbands, Joe Biden and Bill Clinton. The two presidents were greeted by her grandson as the “lovely husbands” of Hillary Clinton and Jill Biden.
Jimmy Carter related to Rosalynn as his equal. In Georgia in that time, this was probably a big deal. Unlike other first ladies, she regularly attended cabinet meetings and officially represented him in meetings with foreign and domestic leaders. This including her being described as his envoy to Latin America in 1977. My impression is that she was the more political one of the two, but that is my own impression.
Her biography singles out two areas where she is identified in her own right. One of these is her work in mental health. She took this on when she was the first lady of Georgia, and it continued to be her main activity as first lady in Washington. But I see this as her own activity and not as part of her joining up with her husband. He did establish the President’s Commission on Mental Health in February 1977, with Rosalynn named as active honorary chair. Later that year, she addressed the World Federation for Mental Health.
The following year, she praised Betty Ford for admitting her addiction to medication and alcohol. and in 1979, she testified before a Senate committee on behalf of the mental health bill that Carter signed into law in October 1980. At the signing ceremony, Senator Kennedy described the bill as a “monument” to the commitment and concern of the First Lady.
The issue continued to receive her attention after their years in the White House. She was especially active with facilitating gatherings on the subject at the Carter Center in Atlanta. She founded and chaired the Carter Center Mental Health Task Force and the Rosalynn Carter Symposium on Mental Health Policy. And she chaired the International Women Leaders for Mental Health. She also supported a Fellows for Mental Health Journalism. And she worked with David Wellstone to pass the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equality Law of 2009 in honor of his father and Pete Domenici.
Related to her work on mental health, she founded the Institute for Caregivers in 1993. Although it was stimulated be her concern about caring for people with mental health problems, she was also aware of the overall problem of elevating the quality of It caregivers generally.
The second area where she is also listed as being active is in women’s rights and particularly in the effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. This is something that I myself did not know before looking for her record on the Internet. Well, I knew about the ERA generally, but my recent research shows a much more impressive picture. Of course, the ERA had a rather mixed history.
In March 1977, early in their first year in the White House, she went to the Houston conference celebrating International Women’s Year to support the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) with Lady Bird Johnson and Bette Ford. Later that same year in November, the three of them were speakers at the National Women’s Conference in New York, along with women’s fights leaders Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem and Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. It seams to me that I was at that conference myself. And I do remember participating with my sister in the 1978 march for the ERA in Washington, DC on my birthday, July 9. But oddly enough, there is no mention of any first ladies at that march.
The Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution was initial pass in 1972 with a deadline of seven years for the States to ratify it after it passed the Congress. This meant 1979. Carter endorsed the Justice Department’s proposal to extend the timeline by three years to 1982. In the 1980 campaign, meanwhile, the Carters were challenged by Kennedy before running a losing campaign against Reagan. And, also meanwhile, 1980 was the first time since the original adoption of the women’s rights convention in 1921 that the Republican Convention dropped its support of the ERA.
Interesting, the Democrats didn’t support the ERA until 1960, and event then it conflicted with their support for the labor movements. The AFL-CIO didn’t support the ERA until 1973. President Kennedy set up a women’s rights body chaired by Elinor Roosevelt who opposed the ERA. It wasn’t until 1972 that it based the House and Senate with support from both parties, although the anti-ERA movement was gaining support from right-wing groups by then.
Rosalyn did do some other interesting things, of course. For example, she is attributed with the idea that the meeting between Egypt and Israel that her husband was planning to host should be held at Camp David. And she also associated the Camp David setting as the inspiration for the Carter Center. She was also the first first lady to have her own office, which was in the east wing that the current president had torn down to make room for his ballroom – talk about contrasting views! She was also involved with the founding of the Friendship Force International, a cultural exchange program where she has the honorary chairperson until 2002. But interestingly, it was Jimmy Carter and not Rosalynn who later wrote a book entitled A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence and Power in 2014.
