WASHINGTON, D.C. – Alabama and national leaders will remember former President Jimmy Carter today during his state funeral at the National Cathedral.
Former U.S. Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., worked for Sen. Howell Heflin, D-Ala., during the last year of the Carter administration. He said Carter should be remembered as a leader who strived to do what was best for people.
“You don’t get to be the president of the United States without being a politician, but in his heart, he was a public servant,” Jones told Alabama Daily News. “And he would do those things that he believed were right, and try to work with people to get those things done that he truly believed were right.”
Jones was in law school when Carter won the presidency in 1976. He recalled celebrating.
“I can remember going to the victory party, and seeing all the peanuts everywhere as part of the party,” Jones said.
The former senator said Carter’s civil rights and humanitarian record stood out.
“He really broke the mold for southern politicians with his appointments, with his policies that were both across racial lines and gender lines,” Jones said.
That impact could be felt in Alabama.
“There were no Black federal judges in Alabama until Jimmy Carter appointed U.W. Clemon and Myron Thompson,” Jones said. Thompson is still on the bench in the middle district in Montgomery.
Jones said Carter should be remembered for his work on energy policy and accomplishing the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel.
Jones said he looks forward to paying his respects at the late president’s funeral and bidding him a final farewell. After the state funeral, Carter and his family will travel back to Georgia for a private service and interment.
“I just think that it is going to be just such a wonderful reminder of what politics and public service should mean,” Jones said.
Funeral plans
Carter, who considered himself an outsider even as he sat in the Oval Office as the 39th U.S. president, will be honored Thursday with the pageantry of a funeral at Washington National Cathedral before a second service and burial in his tiny Georgia hometown.
President Joe Biden, who was the first sitting senator to endorse Carter’s 1976 campaign, will eulogize his fellow Democrat 11 days before he leaves office. All of Carter’s living successors are expected to attend the Washington funeral, including President-elect Donald Trump, who paid his respects before Carter’s casket Wednesday in the Capitol Rotunda.
The rare gathering of commanders in chief offers an unusual moment of comity for the nation in a factionalized, hyper-partisan era. Days of formal ceremonies and remembrances from political leaders, business titans and rank-and-file citizens have honored Carter, who died Dec. 29 at the age of 100, for decency and using a prodigious work ethic to do more than obtain political power.
At the cathedral, Ted Mondale, son of Walter Mondale, Carter’s vice president, is expected to read a eulogy his father wrote for Carter before his own death in 2021. Steve Ford, the grandson of President Gerald Ford, will read a tribute from his grandfather, who died in 2006. Carter defeated Ford in 1976 but the pair, and their first ladies, became close friends, and Carter eulogized Ford at his funeral.
Mourners also will hear from Stu Eizenstat, who was a top White House staffer for Carter, and 92-year-old Andrew Young, a former Atlanta mayor, congressman and U.N. ambassador during the Carter administration. Carter outlived much of his Cabinet and inner circle, but remained especially close to Young — a friendship that brought together a white Georgian and Black Georgian who grew up in the era of Jim Crow segregation.
Thursday will conclude six days of national rites that began in Plains, Georgia, where Carter was born in 1924, lived most of his life and died after 22 months in hospice care. Ceremonies continued in Atlanta and Washington, where Carter, a former Naval officer, engineer and peanut farmer, has lain in state since Tuesday.
Long lines of mourners waited several hours in frigid temperatures to file past his flag-draped casket in the rotunda, as tributes focused as much on Carter’s humanitarian work after leaving the White House as what he did as president from 1977 to 1981.
After the morning service in Washington, Carter’s remains, his four children and extended family will return to Georgia on a Boeing 747 that serves as Air Force One when the sitting president is aboard.
The outspoken Baptist, who campaigned as a born-again Christian, will then be remembered in an afternoon funeral at Maranatha Baptist Church, the small edifice where he taught Sunday School for decades after leaving the White House and where his casket will sit beneath a wooden cross he fashioned in his own woodshop.
Music — sacred, patriotic and popular — will feature prominently throughout the day for the evangelical president who campaigned with the Allman Brothers Band, befriended Willie Nelson and quoted Bob Dylan in his 1977 inaugural address. In Washington, the U.S. Marine Orchestra and Armed Forces Chorus will sing “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” the Navy hymn, for the only U.S. Naval Academy graduate to become commander in chief. Country music stars Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, who succeeded Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter as ambassadors for Habitat for Humanity, will perform John Lennon’s “Imagine,” reprising their role at the former first lady’s funeral in 2023.
Hymns include “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name” and, in Plains, “Let there be Peace on Earth.”
Following a final ride through his hometown, past the old train depot that served as his 1976 presidential campaign headquarters, he will be buried on family land in a plot next to Rosalynn, to whom Carter was married for more than 77 years of marriage.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.