Four Conversations with President Carter

   Sunday July 8 I was in Plains Georgia for President Jimmy Carter's Sunday School class. I got in the overflow room and he came in there for a few minutes of conversation before going in the sanctuary for his Popular Sunday School Class. He asked where people were from and when it came my time I volunteered I was from Collinsville, Alabama where my Grandfather had been a Lincoln Republican. I asked him if not to early in the morning to entertain such notions could he comment on the difference between his great friend of Alabama the Lincoln Republican Judge Frank Johnson and the current crop.

    With a big smile he said, Well there is a difference. Then he got somber and said some of you may know Frank Johnson was my nominee to be attorney General, but he had a bout with ill health and withdrew his nomination. Then Carter said I have gotten to know many great Americans in my lifetime and if not the greatest American, Frank Johnson is very near the top.

    I saw Carter at Furman circa 74 but didn't have a chance to speak to him then. My Good friend the former Chaplain Jim Pitts, whose father was Nixon's barber, has told me on several occasions about his lunch with Carter after a presentation Carter came over to SC to give in Charleston during the SC SBC. This was in 73 or 74. Carter was in town to present the Macdowell Award for Baptist citizenship to Martin England, a founder of Koinonia Farms, and the man widely known to be the initial courier of ML King's letter from the Birmingham Jail to the wider world. Pitts went with then Governor Carter, Martin and Mabel England to lunch, just the four of them.

     In 1993 I was in a Press Room in Birmingham for a CBF convocation where Carter spoke. I said Tom Edsall of the Wash Post in his 83 Book New Politics of Inequality said it was independent oil producers in TX Ok and La who were energized by a windfall profits tax on oil during the Carter Administration to work to make him a one term President. Edsall said thisfaction had bankrolled Birchers and the right wing as far back as Joe McCarthy to have a voice of their own in the US Congress.  As Fundmanentalist leader Paul Pressler's family had long time been in the oil business, Exxon in particular and were marinated in right wing politics for several generations againt Civil Rights and Lyndon Johnson, had he thought about that aspect of the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. He said it had not crossed his radar but found it very interesting.

    In 2007 I was in Atlanta for the Inaugural meeting of the New Baptist Covenant where John Grisham and others spoke. there were many workshops. I attended one on immigration and Carter was there and I spoke to him briefly.

    In 2012 Carter was a keynote speaker in Americus Georgia the opening night for a weekend anniversary celebration of Clarence Jordan and the founding of Koinonia that was key component of the evolution into Habitat for Humanity. I got up front to ask Carter if he was aware Lester Maddox nephew, Baxter Wynn, a Furman trustee and staffer at FBC Greenville was out front in Greenville to come around to honoring the Martin Luther King Holiday.

   I'm not sure Carter completely understood me but again there was a big smile and he said something to the effect Times Change.

    So I'm well aware there have been other more substantive exchanges with Carter including my fellow Furman grad Marshall Frady and his national pieces when Carter was elected President, and my friend Randall Balmer and his new religious political bio of Carter.

   Find Balmer's book. It's a good one.

   I did get to ask a President of the United States a question and bring to his attention my noble Grandfather, my Mother's father, and I am proud of that.

   Post script. On January 31, 2009 I attended a New Baptist Covenant Convocation at the Iconic 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Marian Wright Edelman was there as was Kate Campbell who opened for Emmy Lou Harris in Europe in 2002. Church was packed Standing Room Only when President Carter spoke, I was standing right under the stained glass window when President Carter pointed to it from the Pulpit and reminded the gathered the face of Jesus was blown out in the bomb that killed the four little black girls in September of 1963 just a few weeks after Martin Luther King's I have a Dream Sermon in D.C. and two months before President Kennedy was assassinated.

   I did not speak to Carter that day but was in the crux of a historical moment. Two people down from me to my left was Wayne Flynt, Harper Lee's best friend in Alabama.

   I was there that day for once right where my Momma wanted me to be.