Jimmy Carter’s flag-draped casket on its way to Atlanta as 39th president’s state funeral begins

By KATE PAYNE and BILL BARROW

PLAINS, Ga. — Jimmy Carter’s long public goodbye began Saturday in Georgia, with the 39th U.S. president’s flag-draped casket rolling through his tiny hometown and past his boyhood farmhouse on its way to Atlanta, where he climbed the political ladder and based his decades of humanitarian work after leaving the White House.

The former president’s six-day state funeral started in Americus at the Phoebe Sumter Medical Center, where current and former Secret Service agents who protected the late president loaded his remains into a black hearse and walked alongside as it rolled off the campus toward Plains. With Carter’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren accompanying their patriarch, a mournful train whistle filled the clear air as the pallbearers faced the hearse, hands on their hearts, for a final goodbye.

In Plains, where Carter was born Oct. 1, 1924, and lived most of his life, mourners lined the main street, some holding bouquets of flowers and wearing pins bearing images of the former president. He died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100.

People line the street in Plains, Ga., before the hearse carrying the casket of former President Jimmy Carter passes through the town Saturday, Jan. 4, 2025. Carter died Dec. 29 at the age of 100. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, Pool)

FILE – Former President Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday school class at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown, Aug. 23, 2015, in Plains, Ga. The 90-year-old Carter gave one lesson to about 300 people filling the small Baptist church that he and his wife, Rosalynn, attend. It was Carter’s first lesson since detailing the intravenous drug doses and radiation treatment planned to treat melanoma found in his brain after surgery to remove a tumor from his liver. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

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“We want to pay our respects,” said 12-year-old Will Porter Shelbrock, who was born more than three decades after Carter left the White House in 1981. “He was ahead of his time on what he tried to do and tried to accomplish.”

It was Porter Shelbrock’s idea to make the trip to Plains from Gainesville, Florida, with his grandmother, Susan Cone, 66. He admires Carter for his humanitarian work building houses and waging peace, and talking about a warming planet before the climate crisis was part of routine political discourse.

Willie Browner, 75, described Carter as hailing from a bygone era of American politics.

“This man, he thought of more than just himself,” said Browner, who grew up in the town of Parrott, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) from Plains, before moving to Miami.

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Browner said it meant “a great deal” to have a president come from a small Southern town like his — something he worries isn’t likely to happen again.

Indeed, the procession Saturday was intended to reflect Carter’s deep rural roots and remarkable rise to the world stage as a political leader, global advocate for democracy and human rights, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Over the course of a few blocks in Plains, the motorcade passed near where Carter and his late wife Rosalynn, who died in November 2023, ran the family peanut warehouse, and the small home where his mother, a nurse, had delivered the future first lady in 1927. The hearse passed the old train depot that served as Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign — a barebones effort that depended on public financing, dwarfed by the billion-dollar U.S. presidential campaigns of the 21st century.

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Leaving downtown, the procession passed the home where Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter both died. It’s the same one-story house the couple built before his first Senate campaign in 1962, their lives there interrupted only by four years in the Georgia Governor’s Mansion and four years in the White House.

Then the former president was honored by the National Park Service in front of his family farm, now part of the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park. A few dozen rangers stood in formation in front of the home, which did not have running water or electricity when Carter was a boy, as the old farm bell rang 39 times to honor Carter’s place as the 39th president.

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Beside the house, there remains the tennis court that Carter’s father, James Earl Carter Sr., built for the family — a nod to the blend of privilege and hard rural life that defined the future president’s upbringing. Carter worked his father’s farm throughout the Great Depression but it was land that the elder Carter owned, with the family surrounded by Black tenant farmers in the era of Jim Crow segregation.

Carter wrote and spoke extensively on those formative years and how the abject poverty and institutional racism he saw influenced his future policies in government and his human rights work once he left the White House.

The motorcade was proceeding to Atlanta on Saturday afternoon for a moment of silence in front of the Georgia Capitol and a ceremony at the Carter Presidential Center.

There, Carter will lie in repose until Tuesday morning, when he will be transported to Washington to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol. His state funeral is Thursday at 10 a.m. at Washington National Cathedral, followed by a return to Plains for an invitation-only funeral at Maranatha Baptist Church.

He will be buried near his home, next to Rosalynn Carter.

Bill Barrow, based in Atlanta, has covered national politics including multiple presidential campaigns for the AP since 2012.

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