Dear President Carter,
I was in my second quarter of college when you returned to Plains, Ga., in January 1981. Ronald Reagan had just been inaugurated, and you came back to your hometown soundly defeated. You woke after the election, you later wrote, to “an altogether new, unwanted and potentially empty life.”
All of 18 at the time, I felt some of the same things. I was raised in a conservative family, but my religious beliefs and political values had become very different from my parents’ and from those of almost everyone else I knew. To have arrived at a fundamentally different understanding of the world, with diametrically opposed views about what this country should be and what role religion and government should play in it, deeply unsettled me. I had not left home, but I was a stranger in a strange land.
No one but a teenager in the midst of a convulsive shift in world views would call us two peas in a pod, Mr. Carter, but with the hubris of youth, I felt we were. You in Georgia and me in Alabama — at home but belonging nowhere.
Sometimes I still feel that way.
But when I think about the childhood you describe in your memoir “An Hour Before Daylight,” I know that this is our homeland as much as anyone’s. I know that it’s possible to see our world clearly and to love it anyway.
You are a child of the Jim Crow South who grew up on a farm at a time when Black sharecroppers were hardly more than slaves. But even raised in that world, you understood the injustice of it. “The time for racial discrimination is over,” you said at your gubernatorial inauguration in 1971. Your audience audibly gasped, but for the rest of your political career, you worked to even the playing field for Black Americans.
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