James Earl Carter's ancestors had lived in America since the 1630s. They were residents of Georgia since just after the Revolution. “Jimmy” Carter’s parents, Earl and Lillian Carter, owned a peanut farm and warehouse and a store outside the small town of Plains, Georgia. Earl was bright, hardworking, and a very good businessman. "Miz" Lillian had been trained as a nurse but set aside her career when she became pregnant soon after marriage. She named the first of her four children James Earl, for his father.

Jimmy's mother, well read and curious about the world around her, crossed the then-strict lines of segregation in 1920s Georgia by counseling poor African American women on matters of health care. She sometimes invited black guests to enter her home by the front door, not the back, and hosted them in the living room, not the kitchen—subtle but serious deviations from existing social norms. She did these things when Earl was not at home in an evident concession to his stricter compliance to the rules of race relations in the South.

The family was moderately prosperous by national standards, but wealthy in rural Georgia. Even so, when Jimmy was born in 1924, the first American president to be born in a hospital, he was taken back to a house that lacked electricity and indoor plumbing. Carter describes his childhood in his bestselling book, An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood, published in 2001. Everyone in the family worked but there was also time for fishing, hunting and exploring the woods and streams that surrounded Plains. Even as a young boy, Jimmy stacked produce from the family farm onto a wagon, hauled it into town, and sold it. He saved his money, and by the age of thirteen, bought five houses around Plains that the Great Depression had put on the market at rock-bottom prices. These homes were rented to families in the area. His father was stern but proud of Jimmy. His mother, while also demanding, nurtured and encouraged his reading.

Entertainment was hard to come by in the rural Georgia of the 1930s, and for Jimmy, his mother's brother offered a glimpse of the outside world. Uncle Tom Gordy had joined the United States Navy and sent postcards to the Carters from around the globe. His nephew was fascinated with all the exotic places depicted and began to tell his parents that someday he would be in the Navy too. Before he even entered high school, he had written the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, to ask for a catalogue. In 1941, he graduated as class valedictorian of his tiny high school.

Navy Career and Marriage

The events of World War II (1939-1945) motivated many American patriots like Carter to enter the military service. There was stiff competition for getting into Annapolis, and Carter flung himself into college coursework at Georgia Institute of Technology to enhance his prospects for earning admission to the Naval Academy. He was admitted to Annapolis in 1943 and graduated in the top ten percent of his class in August 1946, just after the end of the war.

Prior to his last year at Annapolis, while on leave, Midshipman Carter went on a date with Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister's. She was only seventeen years old, three years Jimmy's junior. Rosalynn’s father died of cancer when she was thirteen and got hospice care from Lillian Carter at the end of his life. Plains was a small town. When Jimmy first proposed marriage, Rosalynn refused him. Early the following year, however, she visited him at Annapolis, and when he proposed a second time she accepted. The two were married in July of 1946.

For Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, the next eight years were typical of a young postwar, American couple. Their first son was born within a year of their marriage, and there would eventually be two more sons and a daughter. Carter worked long hours while his wife worked at home raising the children. Lieutenant Carter selected the submarine service, the Navy's most hazardous duty.

One incident during this time clearly illustrated Carter's values and beliefs. While his submarine was moored in the Bahamas, British officials extended a party invitation to white crew members only. Partly at Carter's urgings, everyone on the submarine refused to attend. When Carter later told this story to his father, Earl told him that he had been wrong. The British officials were right to exclude black sailors from a social event. Father and son never again talked about race relations or Jimmy’s experiences in the newly integrated American armed forces.

About this time, the Navy was attempting to construct its first nuclear-powered submarines. The program was headed by the brilliant, tough Captain Hyman Rickover. Today regarded as "the father of the nuclear Navy," Rickover was slight, intense, and a demanding taskmaster. Carter was assigned to Rickover's research team, and the uncompromising captain pushed the young lieutenant mercilessly. "I think, second to my own father, Rickover had more effect on my life than any other man," Carter would later say. One of the two new submarines being built was the Seawolf, and Carter taught nuclear engineering to its handpicked crew.

In 1952, when there was a nuclear reactor accident at a Canadian research facility, Carter led a team of Americans who provided expertise and assistance to the Canadians responding to the accident. Carter and other members of his team were exposed to high levels of radiation when they took turns spending a few minutes in the contaminated facility taking steps to shut down and secure the reactor.

Carter’s naval career was flourishing when bad news came from Plains. Carter's father Earl had cancer, and in July 1953, he died. The farm had declined in his last years, and there was real danger that it would now be lost, a crushing prospect to Lillian Carter. After some hard thought, Jimmy decided to resign from the Navy, return to Plains, and take charge of the family enterprises.

Southern Winds of Change

Carter threw himself into farming the way he had his naval duties. But the return to Plains became the greatest crisis of the Carter marriage. Rosalynn, deeply opposed to giving up the travel and financial security of military life, found it a difficult adjustment. The year 1954 saw a terrible drought in Georgia, and net profits from the farm totaled just $187.

The South was changing. The Supreme Court, in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), had declared school segregation unconstitutional. Later in neighboring Alabama, an African American woman named Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a city bus to a white person, and she was jailed for it. Black citizens boycotted the bus system and challenged segregation in court. They were taking a stand against centuries of oppression, and the attitudes of many whites hardened. An organization called the White Citizens Council was formed to maintain the segregated status quo in the South, and its membership blossomed across the region—including in Plains, Georgia. Carter was heavily pressured to join the organization in 1958, but he was the only white male in Plains to refuse. The council's members boycotted Carter's business, but he stubbornly held out and over time, the boycott fizzled out.

Community Involvement and Political Aspirations

Hard work and effective management made the Carter farm prosperous by 1959. Jimmy Carter's involvement in his local community increased as he began to serve on local boards for civic entities like hospitals and libraries. He also became a church deacon and Sunday school teacher at the Plains Baptist Church. In 1955, he successfully ran for office for the first time—a seat on Sumter County Board of Education, eventually becoming its chairman. When a new seat in the Georgia State Senate opened up because of federally ordered reapportionment in 1962, Carter entered that race. Initially defeated in the Democratic primary, he was able to prove that his opponent's victory was based on widespread vote fraud in Quitman County. A judge threw out the fraudulent votes, and Carter won the election. Carter tells the story of his controversial campaign in his book, Turning Point: A Candidate, a State, and a Nation Come of Age (1992).

During his two terms in the state senate, Carter earned a reputation as a tough, independent operator. He promised to read every bill before he cast a vote and kept that promise with long hours of tedious reading. He attacked wasteful government practices and supported an effort to repeal laws designed to discourage African Americans from voting. Consistent with his past practice and his deeply held principles, when a vote was held in his church to decide on whether to allow blacks to worship there, the vote was nearly unanimous against integration. Of the three dissenting votes, two were cast by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.

In 1966, Carter planned to run for the US Congress. However, when a Republican rival announced his candidacy for governor of Georgia, Carter decided to challenge him. This was a mistake. The civil rights movement had created a conservative backlash in the South, ending the solidly Democratic stranglehold on the region. Liberal and moderate Democrats were increasingly vulnerable. Although Carter campaigned hard, he finished third in the 1966 Democratic primary. The eventual winner was Lester Maddox, an ultraconservative who proudly refused to allow blacks to enter a restaurant he owned by standing in the doorway holding an ax. Maddox distributed ax handles during his campaign as a symbol of resistance to the desegregation required under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Carter was bitterly disappointed by his defeat and was saddled with a substantial debt from it. He spent time after the election reexamining his life and faith, spending time on missionary work in Georgia, Mexico City, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Thereafter, observers would describe Carter as a born-again Christian. His political ambitions were also revived, and he began to position himself for the 1970 gubernatorial election. In the late 1960s, Carter traveled and campaigned tirelessly throughout the state.

He ran as a moderate calling for an end to busing as a means to overcome segregation in public schools. He criticized state officials for withdrawing an invitation to George Wallace to speak at the state capital and sought the endorsement of several avowed segregationists. The leading newspaper in the state, The Atlanta Constitution, refused to endorse him, and described Carter as an "ignorant, racist, backward, ultra-conservative, red-necked South Georgia peanut farmer." Carter’s primary opponent, Carl Sanders, was a former governor, lawyer, and businessman with close connections to the Atlanta political establishment and ample campaign funding. Carter referred to Sanders as “cufflinks Carl” and produced posters of himself dressed in simple farmer overalls. The strategy worked, and with the support of rural voters, born-again Christians, and some segregationists, Carter forced a runoff election and then defeated Sanders.

Delivering Change to Georgia

The new governor's inaugural address surprised many Georgians by calling for an end to segregation, and Carter received national attention for it. By and large, Carter governed as a progressive and reformer. During his term, he increased the number of African American staff members in Georgia's government by 25 percent. But his primary concern was the state's outdated, wasteful government bureaucracy. Three hundred state agencies were channeled into two dozen "superagencies." He promoted environmental protection and greater funding for schools. However, he worked poorly with traditional Democratic politicians and gained a reputation with some legislators as an arrogant governor, with a "holier than thou" attitude that isolated him from those who might otherwise have been political allies.

While Carter was serving as governor, he was taking careful measure of the national political landscape. The Democratic presidential candidate in 1972 was George McGovern, a liberal who steadfastly opposed the war in Vietnam. Carter watched McGovern run an impracticable campaign, in which he was portrayed by his opponents as a radical extremist. The Democratic candidate suffered an overwhelming defeat at the hands of Republican incumbent, Richard Nixon. Governor Carter reasoned that the next election would require a different type of Democrat, and he quietly began laying the groundwork for a run for the White House in 1976.