An Hour Before Daylight:: Memories of a Rural Boyhood
By Jimmy Carter, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001
Book Review by Darold H. Morgan,
President Emeritus of the Annuity Board of the SBC
Indisputably, President Jimmy Carter is the most respected living former president of the United States, as well as the most famous Baptist Sunday School teacher in the world. Much of that esteem has come from his highly publicized work with Habitat for Humanity and through the Carter Center on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta, where he and his wife work ceaselessly to help in problem areas around the world. Add to these well-known facts their beautiful loyalty to a little Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, and you have reasons for lauding both President and Mrs. Carter as exemplary citizens.
In this recently published book, which in reality is an autobiography of childhood days on a farm in rural Georgia, we have an enhancing and thoroughly captivating insight into who Jimmy Carter really is. It makes for genuinely fascinating reading. Publicity about this book may be correct when the inference is made that it has the potential of becoming a classic!
The book is exceptionally important because the reader can glean quickly where some of President Carter`s deeply held convictions originate. One of the lasting impressions of this book has to be the extraordinary memories President Carter has of his boyhood, and one of the most vivid of these is the living conditions of both whites and blacks on the Carter farms in southwest Georgia. Could it be that one of the reasons why the Carters devote so much time, energy, and influence in building homes for poor people through Habitat for Humanity comes from observing first hand, as a little boy, the shacks tenant farmers and sharecroppers lived in during the dark days of the Great Depression?
All the way through these childhood memories is the immeasurably rich and deep respect that President Carter had for his father, a successful farmer and merchant, whose planning and organization of his work through the demands of those hardscrabble depression years marked him as an exceptional person. Time and again, his father`s strict segregationalist philosophy, typical to life and culture in that part of the country, comes through in the book. Yet it is always coupled with an unusual and surprising respect for his tenants and sharecroppers. It was also balanced by the independence of his wife, the President`s mother, who as a nurse and also as a very obvious individualist, cared for all levels of people in the community, regardless of race or economic status. Her encouragement of her son to read constantly had a significant impact on his broadening horizons, even in one of the most isolated parts of the nation.
Who would have thought that from a part of the nation where segregation was ingrained so completely, that a leader would arise with convictions about racial equality so deep, that one of the hallmarks of his presidential administration would be racial justice. Especially moving in the book are the accounts marked by graphic details and crisp writing skills, of his childhood friendships with black young men. Carter recounts how African-Americans made him a part of their family life in his impressionable teen years.
Another powerful truth about Carter`s commitment to social justice begins to appear during these childhood years. Imagine growing up in a home without electricity, water, or indoor plumbing. Yet much of the housework and the farming was done by blacks who lived nearby. Salaries were miniscule and benefits were non-existent. Job security was totally absent. At the depths of the depression, President Roosevelt and his vaunted New Deal began slowly to bring recovery despite widespread opposition by farmers to government quotas and bureaucratic supervision.
Young Carter saw the transformation created by federal programs out of Washington: rural electrification, paved roads, some gradual increases in prices for cotton and peanuts, retirement income for older people, and educational grants for neighborhood schools. State and federal government agencies actually did make a difference in the quality of life in rural Georgia. Carter documents, with great sadness, how many farmers resisted some of the controversial practices of farm quotas and the killing of surplus livestock.
One must realize that President Carter indeed was a product of his times and culture. Gradually, young Jimmy began to experience the liberation of broadening horizons. An excellent set of teachers in the local schools, the moral tone of a community dominated by strong clergy (both black and white), and the encouragement of strong-willed parents-all combined to bring to this gawky, undersized, often-barefoot kid a vision of life beyond a farm and a rural Georgia village. One of the strongest characters to emerge in the entire book is the local African Methodist Episcopal Bishop, whose moral dominance in the community paints a portrait of beauty and depth.
Jimmy Carter`s childhood was marked by deep love and esteem, by old fashioned hard work on a farm where the work was never complete, and by a set of values which formed the foundation for his character. These beginnings prepared him superbly for a career that gained him international respect and fruitfulness. You will be glad you read this book!
