Carter was building a career in the Navy when, in 1953, his father died of cancer. A dutiful son, he returned to his small, rural hometown in South Georgia to take over the family’s cash-strapped farm. He arrived six months before the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which unleashed a wave of reactionary politics throughout the South.
As a graduate of Annapolis, and with the broadening experience of a naval career, Carter was certainly among the more open-minded white Southerners of his generation. But he was also an ambitious and well-established member of what King, in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” called “the oppressor race.” Carter largely kept his head down during the events that unfolded in the decade following the Brown decision. He refused to join the Citizens’ Councils—the “white-collar Klan” of its day—yet as a member of his local school board, his record was checkered; sometimes he voted to divert extra resources to his district’s white school.
It was another Supreme Court decision—the “one person, one vote” ruling Baker v. Carr in 1961—that inspired Carter to seek political office. The ruling ended the structural advantages that the rural “courthouse gangs” in Georgia politics had enjoyed for decades. Carter still had to overcome blatant voter fraud by a political boss in a nearby county to win election to the Georgia State Senate.
As a senator, Carter distinguished himself with his forward-looking record. Never lacking ambition, he announced his candidacy for a seat in the House of Representatives in 1966, but quickly switched to the governor’s race, realizing he would prefer the executive authority the governorship would provide. It was a fortuitous decision: If Carter had won election to the House and built his political career there, he likely would never have become president. In the House, he would have had to establish a segregationist voting record to please voters back home, which would have been a liability nationwide by the 1970s. His ability to run as a Washington outsider in 1976, when Watergate was a vivid and recent memory, was key to his presidential campaign.