President Jimmy Carter, Opening Remarks

• Jurisdiction: United States,Federal
• Publication year: 2009
• Citation: Vol. 23 No. 1

OPENING REMARKS

Jimmy Carter^*

In 1920, four years before I was born, the Nineteenth Amendment was passed to give white women the right to vote. African-American women in the South did not get the right to vote until 45 years later, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act. That is a sobering way to start this conference, to remind ourselves that we cannot take basic human rights or civil rights for granted. This describes the situation during my youth.

I grew up in a legally racist society in Archery, Georgia, two and one-half miles west of Plains, Georgia, when "separate but equal" was the law of the land. This was ordained by the Supreme Court and supported without question in the Congress. At the time, there were no vocal members of the American Bar Association who questioned it, and it was supported not only in the South but throughout the country in the general society.

Virtually all of my neighbors, until I was 16 years old and went off to college, were African-Americans. And my black neighbors, adult or child, could not attend our schools or churches. They could not come to our front door. They could not enter our restaurants. They could not ride with white people, or near them, on a train or a bus. They could not vote in elections. They could not hold public office. They could not even serve on the juries before which their cases were tried. This was the law and custom in our country for 100 years and went basically unquestioned.

Although I complied with these southern customs and mores, I saw my mother ignore them completely and with impunity because she was a registered nurse. I later attended the U.S. Naval Academy and was a midshipman when the first African-American to later graduate was admitted. His name was Wesley Brown. Many of us helped him with the pressures put on him by segregationist midshipmen who tried to force him out of the

Academy before he could graduate.

Later, as a submarine officer in July 1948, my life was changed when my Commander in Chief Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9,981, which prohibited racial segregation in all branches of the military.¹Predictably, he was severely condemned by the leaders of the Congress in the House and the

Senate who had been able, barring an executive order, to block any civil rights legislation with their filibusters.

Five months later on December 10, 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted.²There were no negative votes, although Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the Soviet Union and its basic allies all abstained from voting.³It was the atrocities of World War II, especially the Nazi Holocaust, that made this necessary and also universally acceptable. It is sobering to realize that right now, it would be absolutely impossible for the world community to approve the Universal Declaration.

After I left the Navy in 1953, I returned home to Plains, Georgia, and found the racial situation in my community unchanged. Accustomed to Navy life, my wife and I soon ran into problems. We had boycotts organized against our business. We found as we drove up to the only service station in town that they would refuse to put gasoline in our car. It was in May 1954, a year after I returned home, that the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of

Education, outlawing racial discrimination in public schools.⁴Over time it was the young people, the high school students and later the college students, who really accepted the Supreme Court ruling when they played on the same baseball, basketball, and football teams with their classmates. They eventually induced most of their parents to accept it as well.

In December of 1955, six years after Harry Truman issued his executive order, Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and Martin Luther King Jr. rose to prominence in his heroic drive for an end to racial discrimination.

I ran for the Georgia Senate in 1962. I only had one purpose in mind. I was chairman of the county school board and ran for the Senate to help save Georgia's public schools. Our top politicians, including all candidates for governor, pledged to close the public schools completely if one black child was enrolled in a white classroom. Much later, in my inaugural address as governor in January of 1971, I announced in an eight-minute speech that the time for racial discrimination was over.⁵This does not seem very startling in retrospect, but it was newsworthy to the extent that a few months after I made that declaration, I was on the cover of Time magazine.⁶Times change slowly in...