Rosalynn Carter: ‘The Best Part’ Ended. Then Came the White House.

Highlights from her autobiography

Rosalynn Carter, former First Lady of the United States, died today at age 96. In her 1984 autobiography, First Lady from Plains, she recalled:

“With Jimmy’s [1977] inaugural, we hoped to set a tone for an open, inclusive administration, one that would focus on all kinds of people…We planned a simple inauguration, a ‘people’s’ inauguration, so that everyone who came would find something fun or meaningful to do.”

She understood that “we are answerable to all the people — and indebted to so many whom we will try forever and never be able to repay.”

She Grew Up in Plains, Georgia

Rosalynn was born in 1927 to Frances Allethea “Allie” Murray and Wilburn Edgar Smith. She grew up in the small town of Plains, Georgia, where her mother grew flowers like “zinnias, petunias, hollyhocks, [and] crepe myrtle” as well as “fig, pear, pecan and wild cherry [trees], and pomegranate bushes.” Young Rosalynn once tumbled out of the sitting room window into a rosebush. They had a milk cow, pigs and chickens. She learned to sew. There was “no movie theater, no library, no recreation center,” but she read “Heidi and Hans Brinker and Robinson Crusoe.”

The schools and churches were racially segregated, and when a Black person visited a white person, they had to knock on the white person’s back door. Rosalynn spent a lot of time in the town’s Lutheran, Baptist, and Methodist white churches, where she was taught to believe that God’s love was conditional on good behavior. Jimmy Carter wrote in his memoir An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood (2001) that Rosalynn’s Baptist grandfather forbade the family to “play cards, fish, or go to movies on Sundays” and that the churches discouraged drinking.

Rosalynn’s best friend was two years younger; this was Ruth Carter, Jimmy’s sister, just because “there were literally no other girls in town my age.” (The Carters had once lived next door to them but then moved a few miles away.) Not until seventh grade did Rosalynn start to understand there was a world beyond.

In 1944, visiting Ruth’s house when she was seventeen, she noticed the photo of her brother on her bedroom wall and suddenly felt “he was the most handsome young man I had ever seen.” She started trying to get his attention, and eventually he asked her to a movie (on a double-date with Ruth and her boyfriend) and kissed her afterward. She turned down his first marriage proposal, worried it was too soon, but they married in 1946. Jimmy was in the Navy, so Rosalynn became a Navy wife. The first of their four children was born a year later.

After his time in the Navy, Jimmy insisted on returning to Plains. Rosalynn was “dejected” on the drive south: “I thought the best part of my life had ended.”

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that schools had to integrate. White people in Plains were angry. The police chief and a preacher pressured Jimmy to join the White Citizens Council, telling him “he was the only white adult male in the community who had not joined,” but he refused. Jimmy and Rosalyn likewise opposed the new “private academies for whites” as these schools drew students away from newly integrated public schools and reinforced wealth disparities.

In 1961, they built a house in Plains and kept it for the rest of their lives.

Her Life as a ‘Political Partner’

Jimmy ran for a two-year term in the Georgia state senate. After the election, the county boss emptied the ballot box (a whiskey carton) and tossed it under his daughter’s bed. Jimmy fought his election loss in court, proved the fraud, and won the seat. Rosalynn stayed home to run the business and care for the children; she considered herself “more a political partner than a political wife, and I never felt put upon.” Jimmy was reelected to the state senate.

Then, in 1970, he was elected governor, and he and Rosalynn moved into the governor’s mansion, which was an art museum open to the public. They entertained many guests. Rosalynn took a Bible class but no longer had time for lessons of “subservience and discipline,” thinking to herself: “There’s more to living the life Jesus wants us to live.” She began learning about supportive services for people with mental disabilities and described that as her most rewarding work during these years.

During Jimmy’s 1976 presidential campaign, the press referred to Rosalynn as a “steel magnolia” (a tough femme), “to which I didn’t object,” she wrote. Jimmy was elected President, and Rosalynn became First Lady.

One of her first delights in the White House was that she could watch any movie she liked. “We ordered such classics as Citizen Kane, Casablanca, and High Noon”; for other films, she enjoyed advance screenings and met the actors. However, when Jimmy learned that the annual White House budget for magazine and newspaper subscriptions was $85,000 and that there were 325 televisions and 220 radios in the White House, he cut back for frugality’s sake.

Because “the legacy of Watergate was still very recent,” they started off with a rigid policy of returning all gift packages unopened; later, to avoid causing offense, they had their staff open and examine the packages before deciding whether to return them or donate the contents to charity.

“I often acted as a sounding board for him,” Rosalynn said. But she did more: on her travels, she “talked with women about their problems, visited day care centers, and met with children in New York’s inner-city schools. From these and many similar experiences, I could give Jimmy a firsthand report of the attitudes and needs of people in our country.”

She worked to improve her Spanish before a diplomatic tour of multiple countries in Latin America where she and her husband spoke of human rights and democracy. “Derechos Humanos! is a cry that cannot be stilled,” she wrote.

She kept working on the needs of people with mental illness, on the principle that these people should have access to treatment, free from stigma.

Rosalynn felt that, by the time she moved into the White House, First Ladies were expected to devote themselves to work that was “substantive, highly publicized, and closely scrutinized. I am thankful for the change.”

One centerpiece remains unfinished. “An Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution,” she said,

“would protect women’s gains and ensure that future laws would not discriminate against them. But great progress comes slowly, and someday, a day I hope to see in my lifetime, we will look back on this struggle as we look back now on the long but successful struggle for women’s suffrage and wonder why. Why all the controversy and why such difficulty in giving women the protection of the Constitution that should have been theirs long ago?”

Though many states ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, the Constitution was not amended, and Rosalynn Carter did not see it happen in her lifetime.

She Moved Back to Plains

Jimmy Carter wasn’t reelected, and the couple returned to Plains. As he explained in his 2001 memoir: “It’s where we raised our own children, built our first and only home forty years ago…There is a sense of harmony here, of mutual respect between black and white citizens…”

A typical Sunday dinner at Rosalynn’s mother’s home, according to Jimmy, involved

“a long, pleasant, rambling discussion…Collectively, they knew almost everything that had happened in our town, the churches, or the school… those who weren’t washing dishes would sit on the front porch and continue a detailed discussion of the weather, the status of the crops, or interesting tidbits of news about the families of people who happened to be passing by on the road in the front of the house.”

Rosalynn will be buried there.