![]() ![]() Board of Education of Topeka (1954), had declared school segregation unconstitutional. The Supreme Court, in the landmark case of Brown v. The year 1954, saw a terrible drought in Georgia, and net profits from the farm totaled just $187. Rosalynn, deeply opposed to giving up the travel and financial security of military life, found it a difficult adjustment. But the return to Plains became the greatest crisis of the Carter marriage. Southern Winds of ChangeĬarter threw himself into farming the way he had his naval duties. After some hard thought, Carter decided to resign from the Navy, return to Plains, and help his family. The farm had declined in his last years, and there was real danger that it would now be lost, a crushing prospect to Lillian Carter. Carter's father Earl had cancer, and in July 1953, he died. One of the two new submarines being built was the Seawolf, and Carter taught nuclear engineering to its handpicked crew. "I think, second to my own father, Rickover had more effect on my life than any other man," Carter would later say. Carter was assigned to Rickover's research team, and the young lieutenant was pushed mercilessly by the uncompromising captain. Today regarded as "the father of the nuclear Navy," Rickover was slight, intense and a demanding taskmaster. The program was headed by the brilliant, tough Captain Hyman Rickover. Partly at Carter's urgings, everyone on the submarine refused to attend.Ībout this time, the Navy was attempting to construct its first nuclear-powered submarines. While his submarine was moored in Bermuda, British officials there extended a party invitation to white crewmembers only. One incident during this time clearly illustrated Carter's values and beliefs. Lieutenant Carter selected the submarine service, the Navy's most hazardous duty. Carter worked long hours while his wife worked at home raising the children. Their first son was born within a year of their marriage, and there would eventually be two more sons and a daughter. The two were married in July of 1946.įor Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, the next eight years were typical of a young postwar, American couple. Early the following year, however, she visited him at Annapolis, and when he proposed a second time she accepted. When Carter first proposed marriage, she refused him. She was only seventeen-years-old, three years Jimmy's junior. ![]() Prior to his last year at Annapolis, while on leave, Midshipman Carter met Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister's. Carter was admitted to Annapolis in 1943 and graduated in the top ten percent of his class in August 1946, just after the end of the war. There was stiff competition for admission into Annapolis and thus, Carter flung himself into his coursework, studying for a year at Georgia Institute of Technology in 1942. The events of World War II (1939-45) motivated many American patriots like Jimmy to enter the military service. In 1941, he graduated as class valedictorian of his tiny high school. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, to ask for a catalogue. Before he even entered high school he had written the U.S. ![]() His nephew was fascinated with all the exotic places depicted in the cards and began to tell his parents that someday he'd be in the Navy, too. Uncle Tom Gordy had joined the United States Navy, and sent postcards to the Carters from around the globe. His mother, Lillian, while also demanding, nurtured and encouraged his reading.Įntertainment was hard to come by in the rural Georgia of the 1930s, and for Jimmy his mother's brother offered a glimpse of the outside world. These homes were rented to families in the area. He saved his money, and by the age of thirteen, he bought five houses around Plains that the Great Depression had put on the market at rock-bottom prices. By the time he was ten, the boy stacked produce from the family farm onto a wagon, hauled it into town, and sold it. The family became moderately prosperous, but when Jimmy was born in 1924, the first American president to be born in a hospital, he was taken back to a house that lacked electricity and indoor plumbing. Jimmy's mother, well read and curious about the world around her, crossed the then-strict lines of segregation in 1920s Georgia by counseling poor African American women on matters of health care. She named the first of her four children James Earl, for his father. "Miz" Lillian had been trained as a nurse, but abandoned her career when she became pregnant soon after marriage. Earl was bright, hardworking, and a very good businessman. “Jimmy” Carter’s parents, Earl and Lillian Carter, owned a peanut farm and warehouse and a store outside the small town of Plains, Georgia. They were residents of Georgia since just after the Revolution. James Earl Carter's ancestors had lived in America since the 1630s. ![]()
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