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HOME   -   PEOPLE IN HISTORY A-Z   -   JIMMY CARTER

 
   


Jimmy Carter, born 1924
Jimmy Carter (born 1924)

 

Formidable Defender of Human Rights

From 1977 to 1981, Democrat James Earl Carter, Jr. was the 39th president of the United States.

 


Waging Peace, Fighting Disease, Building Hope

No matter where you stand in politics, you will probably agree that Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn are outstanding advocates of human rights.

See more at the Carter Center, which, according to the site,

has helped to improve life for people in 80 countries by resolving conflicts, advancing democracy and human rights, preventing diseases, and improving mental health care.

 




Jimmy Carter Tidbits

:: 1977

Here is Jimmy Carter's Address to the Nation on Energy, from April 18, 1977:

 


 

On December 2, 1977, Jimmy Carter had nice words for fellow Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey.

Check here for Carter's speech, To Hubert H. Humphrey.


 

:: 1979

On June 18, 1979, Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev met at Vienna where they signed  SALT II, a missile reduction agreement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.



On July 15, 1979, Jimmy Carter delivered his
Crisis of Confidence Speech, nationwide televised.
 


:: 2002

In 2002, Carter received the Nobel Prize for Peace.


 

Jimmy Carter's Family

Jimmy's father was Earl Carter.

His mother was Lillian Gordy Carter.

Father Earl was a professional peanut farmer. Mother Lillian was a nurse.


Wee Jimmy Carter and Dog Bozo, 1937
Wee Jimmy Carter and Dog Bozo, 1937
Jimmy Carter Library

 

In 1946, Jimmy married Eleanor Rosalynn Smith. Rosalynn was also born in Plains, Georgia, on August 18, 1927.

Together they have four children, 3 boys, 1 girl:

John William (Jack), born in Virginia in 1947,
James Earl III, born in Hawaii in 1950,
Donnel Jeffrey (Jeff), born in Connecticut in 1952,
and Amy Lynn, born in Georgia, in 1967.

 

Jimmy Carter — Brief Biography

1924, October 1 - Birth at Plains, Georgia, USA

1946 - Graduation from U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland and U.S. Navy

1953 - Goes back to the family's peanut farm after father Earl dies. Rosalynn is not thrilled but rolls up her sleeves and excels as the bookkeeper of the operation.

1962 Senator

1964 Re-elected senator

1970 Governor

1976, November - Carter defeats the incumbent Jerry Ford

1977 President

1981
Ronald Reagan becomes 40th president


 



More . . .

Jimmy Carter on Prisons

There is an inevitable chasm between societal leaders who write and administer criminal laws and the people who fill the jails, often unnecessarily.

The cumulative effect of this gap is a lowering of barriers against discrimination and violence that affects racial minorities, women, the mentally handicapped, and others who are naturally more helpless and vulnerable.

We who are more privileged are not deliberately perpetuating our status at the expense of others, but we rarely wish to confront or be involved in the problem.

Exalted commitments to peace and human rights are abandoned as we accept and rationalize the privileges we enjoy.

The prison system is just one clear example.

At that time, in the 1970s, only one in a thousand Americans was in prison, but our nation's focus has turned increasingly to punishment, not rehabilitation.

During the past three decades extended incarceration of people convicted of drug use and other nonviolent crimes has replaced an emphasis on rehabilitation with job training and restoration of citizens' rights after the convicted have paid their debt to society.

There are now more than five times as many American inmates in federal, state, and local prisons as when I was president, and the number of incarcerated black women has increased by 800 percent!

An ancillary effect is that this increased incarceration has come at a tremendous financial cost to taxpayers, at the expense of education and other beneficial programs. The cost of prosecuting executed criminal is astronomical.

Since 1973, California alone has spent roughly $4 billion in capital cases, leading to only thirteen executions, amounting to about $307 million spent for the killing of each prisoner.

Although the number of violent crimes has not increased, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 7.43 per 1,000 adults imprisoned at the end of 2010.

With only 4.5 percent of the world's population, we claim 22 percent of the world's prison population. Many of these prisoners, some now incarcerated for life, have never been found guilty of a violent crime but have been convicted of drug-related offenses.

The American Civil Liberties Union reported in November 2013 that there are now 3,278 persons in federal and state prisons who are serving life sentences without parole — for nonviolent crimes! Not surprisingly, 65.4 percent of them are black.

I gave a major address about drug use while president in 1979 and called for the decriminalization of marijuana, but not its legalization, with an emphasis on treatment and not imprisonment for users who were not involved in the distribution of narcotics. This proposal was well received at the time, but the emphasis was placed on punishment and not rehabilitation after I left office.

Despite the proliferation of excessive imprisonments, the number of pardons by U.S. presidents has also been dramatically reduced. I issued 534 pardons in my four-year term, and in their eight-year terms Ronald Reagan issued 393, Bill Clinton 396, and George W. Bush 189, but in his first term Barack Obama issued only 23.

Jimmy Carter, A Call to Action,
Page 34, Simon & Schuster, 2014

 


Jimmy Carter on Rape

According to the U.S. Justice Department, there were 191,610 cases of rape or sexual assault in the United States in 2006, and 91 percent of the victims were female. That's more than 475 women assaulted every day.

The estimate is that only 16 percent of these cases are reported to the police; the rate drops to fewer than 5 percent on college campuses.

Girls and women of all ages and all background suffer from the same or worse sexual violence throughout the world, and some traditional practices constitute, extol, and perpetuate sexual violence against women and girls.

...

The gang rape in Delhi of a twenty-three-year-old student on a bus in December 2012 is one of the most horrible examples: she was raped by several men, who then used an iron rod to penetrate her genitals so deeply that her intestines had to be surgically removed. She died thirteen days later.

Jimmy Carter, A Call to Action,
Page 118, Simon & Schuster, 2014

On to page 191:

[British foreign secretary William] Hague and Ms. Jolie declared that more than twenty thousand women were raped in Bosnia and Herzegovina, more than fifty thousand in Sierra Leone, and at least 250,000 were raped during the one hundred days of genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Only a few men have ever been brought to justice for these crimes. Similar reports are now emerging from the civil conflict in Syria.

...

It was reported that 74 percent of survivors of rape treated in a hospital in Goma, in eastern Congo, were children, and eleven baby girls between the ages of six and twelve months had been raped!

 

See also the motion picture In the Land of Blood and Honey, produced and directed by Angelina Jolie.

 

 

Buy direct from Simon & Schuster:

Jimmy Carter - A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power
Jimmy Carter - A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power
Simon & Schuster, 2014

 

 

Jump To . . .

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