President Jimmy Carter: 'I Was The Only White Child In The Neighborhood'
What you didn’t know about the former president’s childhood (and how it changed the rest of his life)
Jimmy Carter was born James Earl Carter Jr. on October 1, 1924. He grew up in the rural town of Archery, Georgia. When he wasn’t helping his father on the peanut farm, he was fishing or playing in the woods with his friends, most of whom were African-American.
“The people with whom I worked in the field, and the people with whom I wrestled and fought, and the people with whom I went fishing and hunting were all African-Americans,” President Carter told Oprah in an interview taped a few weeks before the former president announced he has melanoma. “I felt, kind of, in an alien culture when I got old enough to go to a white school and that sort of thing.”
Ultimately, the former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner said in this weekend’s “SuperSoul Sunday” interview, growing up as the only white child in a predominantly black community had a profoundly positive impact on his life.
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