Remembering and Honoring Jimmy Carter

I had the pleasure of working on four Habitat projects with Jimmy Carter, my favorite president. Here's my remembrance of him -- and of Habitat for Humanity.

Election night 1976 is the only election night where I recall shedding tears of joy as the returns came in and it was announced that Jimmy Carter would be our next president.

Maybe I started supporting Habitat for Humanity because of him, or maybe not, but I was on their mailing list when it was announced that 1995’s Jimmy Carter Work Project would be on the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. I had moved from Brooklyn to Denver in 1991, and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to drive to South Dakota and work on one of the 28 houses being built in a “blitz build.” Like others, I made sure to swing by the house he and Rosalynn were working on, and I attended the “Habitation” celebration on the evening of day 7 at which he and founder Millard Fuller spoke, urging attendees not to think of this as simply a “peak experience,” but to find a Habitat affiliate near us and volunteer.

Thoroughly inspired by them and the experience, within a couple years I had read most of Millard and Linda Fuller’s many books, including The Excitement is Building, Theology of the Hammer, and Bokotola, the latter of which tells the story of how the Fullers first employed what became the Habitat model to build homes in Zimbabwe, using sand from the Congo River and Portland cement donated from American donors to build homes on a plot of land that had been a buffer zone between white and native neighborhoods during colonial days. The translation of “Bokotola,” I learned, was “people who don’t like other people.”

I learned how the Fullers then put that concept to work at Koinonia Farm, Clarence Jordan’s “demonstration plot for 1st Century Christianity” a few miles south of Plains, Georgia. It got Jimmy Carter’s attention, and the rest is history. Jimmy Carter’s involvement greatly increased public awareness of Habitat for Humanity, and I believe he served for a while on its board of directors where his primary job was soliciting big-time benefactors to the non-profit, at which he excelled. The first Jimmy Carter Work Project was in 1984, only three summers after he left the White House.

I did get involved in Habitat’s Denver affiliate, serving as the first chair of its speakers bureau, giving perhaps 200 speeches to churches, service organizations, and any other group that wanted to hear the Habitat story, of which I remain an expert.

The next year, 1996, I participated in that year’s Jimmy Carter Work Project, which was in Watts, Los Angeles, near the famous Watts Tower. Volunteers (and the Carters) were housed in dormitories on the USC campus. One morning, after getting my breakfast from the buffet, I saw Jimmy at a 4-person table with an empty seat and asked if I could join him. Of course, he replied, and we had a pleasant conversation. I remember asking how his daughter Amy was, but I don’t recall his answer other than “fine” or its equivalent. Jimmy likes to meet as many volunteers as possible, and eating with us was part of that. Rosalynn wasn’t as keen and stayed in their room. Perhaps he brought her breakfast….

Scotti Zekman, my significant other at the time, joined me at the Watts build but missed that breakfast. She did, however, attend another breakfast at which Rosalynn showed up, hands on hip, saying she had left her hammer in a porta potty and needed it back. Later, she held it over her head triumphantly when it was returned to her.

I have shed additional tears on Jimmy’s passing and still do, thinking about what a great man he was — all his life, not just after the White House. I’ll investigate the 30 books he wrote and maybe listen to one or two of them on Audible or as an eBook from our public library.

Today I learned about this beautiful tribute to him by Michael Tomlinson. I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I did. It was composed a few years ago, not now.

After those two Jimmy Carter Work Projects — it was later renamed the Jimmy and Roslynn Carter Work Project — I attended two more, but only for the prebuilds. Someone told me that prebuilds were “the best,” and I loved working on the prebuilds in rural Tennessee in 1998 and in Americus and Plains, Georgia, in 2000. (I made a point to visiting Koinonia Farm while I was there.) The latter build was intended to be the final build, but afterwards Jimmy changed his mind and kept building for 20 more years. Like me, he probably thought 75 was old, until he got there!

The prebuilds were longer than one week. They involved “setting the stage” for the blitz build — primarily installing the joists and subflooring on the concrete foundations for each house so they would be ready for framing. We were housed and fed well, and we got to know our fellow volunteers much better than at the frenzied blitz build. And we were picked up at and returned to the Atlanta airport, three hours north.

The Fullers and Carters were of the same mind spiritually, and I don’t recall which of them coined the phrase “ministry of reconciliation” to describe Habitat’s mission. I learned that Jimmy selected the location for each work project based on that mission. Eagle Butte was chosen because of the famous Wounded Knee massacre of 300 Lakota Indians in 1890, brought to public attention by the “second Wounded Knee occupation” in the 1970s. He chose Watts for 1996 because of the Rodney King beating and the acquittal of the officers who beat him, which led to the riots of 1992.

Apparently, the Carter Work Project will continue without Jimmy and Rosalynn, because the 2024 project in Minneapolis was held during the week of Jimmy’s 100th birthday, Oct. 1st. It was hosted by Garth Brooks and Tricia Yearwood, who have participated in previous work projects with Jimmy and Rosalynn along with many other celebrities. (George Lopez entertained us at the Watts project.) I’m glad to hear that. I suspect Minneapolis was chosen because of the George Floyd murder — again, it’s about being a ministry of reconciliation.

As I write the above, I realize that my emotion around Jimmy Carter goes hand-in-glove with my emotional connection to Habitat for Humanity and to the story of Koinonia Farm, which you’ll read about in the Fullers’ early books. Koinonia was, as I described above, Clarence Jordan’s “demonstration plot in 1st Century Christianity,” based on the preaching of Jesus instead of the preaching of organized religion. Blacks and whites lived, ate and worked together growing and selling pecans to tourists. I recommend Googling “history of koinonia farm” where you’ll learn about how it was founded by two Baptist ministers and their wives in 1942, as a place to live out the principles of pacifism, simplicity and racial integration in a society where those principles were anathema. Millard and Linda Fuller lived at Koinonia in the 1950s. Following the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education in 1956, the Ku Klux Klan was reinvigorated and began getting violent against Koinonia, including night riders driving through the settlement’s circular road, shooting up its homes and buildings. Luckily no one was hit by their bullets, and the residents didn’t back down. When their roadside stand for selling pecans was firebombed for the second time, they gave up selling locally and began a mail order business which continues to this day. Their motto was “Help us ship the nuts out of Georgia!” One of their specialties became smoked pecans, which they discovered were tasty after salvaging product from the firebombed roadside stand. I ordered some in the 1990s.

You might also want to search for Clarence Jordan books, which are still available on Amazon. He was famous for writing the “cotton patch version” of the Gospel, which you’ll find fascinating. It took the teachings out of the middle east and put them in rural Georgia, so that, for example, the “road to Damascus” might have been the “road to Atlanta” and Jesus’s sermons and stories were retold in ways with which poor Southerners could identify.

If you have read this far, thank you for bearing with my lengthy sharing of the emotional basis for my remembrance of Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter as well as of Millard and Linda Fuller and Clarence Jordan. BTW, you may recall that Jimmy’s chief of staff (and campaign manager) was Hamilton Jordan (pronounced Jurdan). He was the nephew of Clarence Jordan (also pronounced that way, which I’m told is common in Georgia).

Thank you, Jimmy Carter, for your life well lived. You should be an inspiration to all.