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While his home was always in the small Georgia town, Atlanta gave him the opportunities to cement a political and humanitarian legacy.
Jan. 5, 2025, 4:00 p.m. ET
The mythology of Jimmy Carter begins and ends in Plains, the small Georgia town that raised him and kept drawing him back.
Yet roughly 150 miles away is Atlanta, a city just as essential to understanding the life of the 39th president. If Plains was his home, Georgia’s capital was his stage. If Plains reflected Mr. Carter’s small-town character, Atlanta fit his global ambitions.
While it was never a permanent home, Atlanta allowed him to develop policy priorities and kick off a national political career. Then, after leaving Washington, it gave him the space to burnish a humanitarian legacy, housing his efforts to promote equality, peace and democratic ideals.
Now, because Mr. Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, chose to place the Carter Center, their presidential library and the crown jewel of their post-presidential work, in the city, it is where hundreds of visitors will shuffle through the cold to pay their respects while he lies in repose through Tuesday.
“It would have been inconceivable to put everything in Atlanta and to move to Atlanta, because that’s not where they’re from, that’s not who they are,” Jason Carter, Mr. Carter’s grandson, said in an interview. But, he added, “the platform that was available to them in Atlanta was going to be exactly what they needed to have this global jumping-off point.”
Mr. Carter was undeniably shaped by the years he spent in youth on his father’s peanut farm. But beginning with his campaign to serve in the State Senate, he sought to bridge what was often a yawning divide between the rural region where he grew up and the urban engine of the state.
