ATLANTA (AP) – The voice of Martin Luther King Sr., a melodic tenor like his slain son, echoed through Madison Square Garden, calming Democrats who had nominated his friend and fellow Georgian for president.
“Surely the Lord sent Jimmy Carter to go out and get America back where it belongs,” said the revered black pastor as the candidate smiled behind him. “I’m with him. You’re too much. Let me tell you, we have to close ranks now.”
Carter then shared a moment with Coretta Scott King, holding hands and making eye contact with the widowed first lady of the Civil Rights Movement, watching her children.
For the Kings, the closing of the 1976 convention confirmed their continued reach and pragmatism eight years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. For Carter, it marked the evolution of a white politician from the Old Confederacy: As an aspiring local leader and state senator, he had mostly avoided controversial positions during the civil rights era. In all his years in Atlanta, he never met the leader of the movement.
“Carter never did anything racist himself. But he didn’t participate,” said biographer Jonathan Alter. “And King was right there.”
Yet the alliance Carter later forged with the King family endured as he became a governor, president, and global humanitarian who advanced racial equality and human rights.
“He was one of the few presidents who was truly an advocate for the black community out of purity of heart,” said the Rev. Bernice King, who directs the King Center that her mother founded.
Now 98, Carter is receiving hospice care in Plains, Georgia. King, just 39 when he was shot in 1968, would have been 94.
King would certainly have expanded his own legacy with a longer lifespan: after civil rights victories for black Americans, he focused on challenging Western militarism and rapacious capitalism, and there’s no telling which kind of relationship King might have had with Carter. once the Georgia Democrat rose to high office.
As it was, Carter used the most visible decades of his public life to reflect King’s values and often his rhetoric, while playing a central role in commemorating King as an American icon.
Carter opened government contracts to black-owned businesses and appointed a record number of black citizens to executive and judicial positions. He directed more public money to historically black colleges and opposed tax breaks for discriminatory private schools. He echoed King’s emphasis on peace, expressing pride long into his presidency that he never started a war shot.
Carter cited many of the same theologians King cited in his practice of nonviolent resistance, and would join King in 2002 as a Nobel Peace Prize winner. As former president, Carter followed up on King’s later economic remarks, declaring the US an oligarchy, rather than a fully functioning democracy, due to the inequality of wealth and money in politics.
That record, Bernice King told The Associated Press, cements Carter as a “courageous” and “principled” figure who built on her father’s work while also having “authentic” relationships with her mother and her grandfather
Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter welcomed the Kings to the White House to present Coretta with a posthumous Medal of Freedom for her husband, making him one of the few black Americans to receive the nation’s highest civilian honor at the time moment Carter helped establish government celebrations of King’s birthday and authorized the federal historic site that includes King’s birthplace, burial site and the family’s Ebenezer Baptist Church.
The former president even served as a private mediator for King’s children, helping to resolve a sprawling dispute over their parents’ property. “I appreciate their efforts” to end the highly publicized fight, Bernice King said.
Just 5 years old when his father was killed, the younger king said he “doesn’t really know” when the families’ friendship began. She believes her mother made the first overture, after Carter became governor of Georgia in 1971.
“My mother was the type of leader who made sure to connect with people who she felt could help her in the work she was doing to carry on my father’s legacy,” King said.
It hadn’t been obvious before Carter came into state office that he might be that partner.
During the height of the Civil Rights Movement, while Martin Luther King Jr. worked with President Lyndon Johnson on the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, Carter was a one-term state senator. He supported Johnson’s election in 1964 and never aligned with fellow segregationists in Atlanta, but Carter did not speak out in favor of federal laws during his two gubernatorial campaigns, nor did he present at Ebenezer, just a few blocks from the Georgia Capitol. .
When King was killed, Carter did not attend the funeral. In 1970, he won the governor’s race as a conservative Democrat, avoiding explicit mentions of race while assuring voters of his general preference for “local control” over federal intervention.
A “keyword campaign,” Alter called it.
Then, at his inauguration, the 46-year-old Carter issued a surprise edict: “The time of racial discrimination is over.”
Bernice King called his statement “very profound at the time.”
A few years later, Carter stayed with the King family at the Georgia Capitol as Coretta unveiled a portrait of King, while members of the Ku Klux Klan protested outside.
The king Mr. he had no trouble reconciling Carter’s early maneuvers before reaching the governor’s seat.
“He had never been characterized as a ‘cracker’ legislator, as so many country statesmen had been,” the elder King wrote in his autobiography.
He said Carter “achieved an unusual reputation” among black voters with his “willingness to meet with people and work long hours on problems and needs.”
This attention pointed the way for Democrats, as expanded voting rights finally allowed black voters to wield political power. Every Democratic president since then has depended on strong black support to win the nomination and general election. President Joe Biden has acknowledged the dynamic by pushing the national party to put more diverse states, including Georgia, ahead of the nominating process.
Political calculations aside, Bernice King said her grandfather and Carter shared “a real kinship” as two Baptists growing up in small-town Georgia. The elder king once described their conversations as “one country boy to another.”
Carter made an in-person visit to the older king to ask for his support at the start of his presidential bid. Never a party loyalist, the elder King initially told Carter that he would support his bid for the White House only if Republican Vice President Nelson Rockefeller did not run again. King’s reasoning: Carter was a long shot, while Rockefeller, a civil rights liberal, was already a heavyweight.
When it became clear that Rockefeller would not be President Gerald Ford’s running mate in 1976, King supported Carter. It was an invaluable imprimatur for a white Southern governor of the same generation as segregationists like George Wallace of Alabama and Lester Maddox of Georgia.
King endorsed Carter in black churches across the country and in the nearly all-white national press corps, especially after Carter disrupted discussions of federal housing policy by advocating “ethnic purity” in American neighborhoods.
Carter tried to clean up his comments with further explanation, saying he would “very strongly and aggressively oppose” any “exclusion of a family based on race or ethnicity,” but still saw it as “good to keep the ‘homogeneity of the neighborhoods if” they have been established that way”.
Carter eventually followed through with an apology.
Bernice King said her grandfather saw Carter’s choice of words as “an innocent mistake” and urged reporters and voters to look at Carter’s values and full record.
For the first half of Carter’s long life, she “had to navigate a society, a culture where, as a white person, you were expected to hate and see black people in a very degrading way,” Bernice said. King. Looking back on his entire life, he said, “I think he handled it very well.”
Along the way, Carter learned something the King brothers and cousins always understood about their grandfather and that “booming” voice.
“When Grandpa opened his mouth,” Bernice King said, “you paid attention.”
