Every incoming president faces tough questions about the people he hires to work in his inner circle. But President Jimmy Carter had to overcome a unique set of hurdles in 1977 when he and Rosalynn Carter wanted to bring a young Black woman up from Georgia to serve as nanny for their 9-year-old daughter Amy.
The challenge is that Mary Prince had been convicted of murder in 1970 and sentenced to serve a life sentence in prison. While the Carters believed that she had been wrongfully convicted, they had to deal with pushback from other members of the White House staff as well as from the media and the public at large, as Time magazine, the Washington Post and other outlets reported.
Still, the Carters didn’t hesitate. The story of the Carters’ loyalty to Prince, now in her late 70s, is being resurrected following the former president’s death on Sunday at age 100. The former first couple’s willingness to back her as an employee, secure her reprieve and remain lifelong friends is seen as an example of the couple’s reputed decency and commitment to social justice.
For the Carters, bringing Prince to live with them in the White House was key to their daughter’s happiness. The shy and studious girl was having trouble adjusting to life in Washington, D.C., and Prince had become her devoted caretaker when she was 3 years old.
“Amy’s been much happier, since Mary (Prince) got out of prison and came up to the White House to be with us,” Carter wrote in his diary in late February 1977, according to the Washington Post.
Raised in poverty in rural Georgia, Prince began working for the Carters in the Georgia governor’s mansion in Atlanta as part of a special prison work program in 1970. Prince was excited just to meet the couple when she traveled from her prison to the governor’s mansion for her interview.
“I was thrilled,” Prince recalled in a 1977 interview with People. “All my life I had wanted to meet a governor or a president. But I was nervous, too. I wondered how the Carter family would take to me.”
Amy took to her right away, Prince told People. By day, she looked after the future first daughter, but at night she had to return to her cot at a nearby prison, the Washington Post said.
“She liked me to sing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ to her every night, and I would rub her back and lie down with her,” Prince told People. “She would even cry at night because she hated to see me leave.”
The job was expected to be part of Prince’s rehabilitation after her murder conviction. As Prince told People, she was working as a restaurant cashier in a small Georgia town when she and a cousin went out one night to a local bar. There, Prince’s cousin got into a dispute with another woman outside the bar, and the woman began fighting over a gun. When Prince tried to intervene, the gun went off and killed the woman’s boyfriend.
Prince said she met her white, court-appointed attorney just twice for 10 or 15 minutes before he entered a guilty plea on her behalf — to murder, not involuntary manslaughter as she expected. “The whole time in court took less than an hour, and I was sentenced right there to life in prison,” she said.
Incarcerated at a women’s prison, Prince worked in the kitchen and sang in the choir before landing her job with the Carters, People reported. The future president agreed that her attorney had misled her and that she was “completely innocent,” as he wrote in his 2006 book, “Our Endangered Values.” He believed that she had been unfairly victimized by the criminal justice system because of her race. “She was fortunate and could just as easily have been executed,” Carter wrote. “If the victim had been white, we would never have known Mary Prince.”
After Carter won the 1976 presidential election, he and Rosalynn asked Prince to join them in Washington, D.C. But to make that happen, the Carters had to secure a reprieve from Georgia’s parole board — and Carter had to get himself designated as her parole officer.
Carter’s press team didn’t try to talk the president or his wife out of their decision to bring Prince into the White House, the Washington Post reported. They also ignored reporters’ questions about her, Gerald Rafshoon, who served as White House communications director for part of Carter’s presidency, said.
As Amy’s nanny, Prince lived in a third-floor apartment in the White House and received a salary of $6,004 a year. She accompanied her young charge everywhere, from state dinners and trips to Africa and Central America to the girl’s school functions and swimming lessons, the Washington Post and Times UK reported. She once even spent the night with Amy and a playmate in a tree house outside the Oval Office, the Post said.
In certain ways, Prince became the most famous nanny in the world, with profiles in People magazine and the Miami Herald. However, some of the attention was uncomfortable. “Saturday Night” featured her in a cringeworthy skit, as Time reported, with Sissy Spacek playing Amy. Cast member Garrett Morris, in drag, played Prince, telling young Amy a bedtime story about being a streetwise criminal.
Following Carter’s defeat in the 1980 presidential election, Prince followed the family back to Plains, Georgia, where she lived a few blocks from their home, Time reported. She worked as their housekeeper and babysat the Carters’ grandchildren. She also became a confidante of Rosalynn Carter, who died in 2023. Eventually, she received a full pardon from the state of Georgia, as Carter wrote in “Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President.”
In 2015, author Kate Anderson Brower spoke to CSPAN about Prince’s relationship with the Carters, as she was promoting her book, “The Residence,” on life inside the White House.
“She still takes care of Amy’s family and she’s considered an honorary Carter,” Brower told C-SPAN. For her part, Prince told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2002 that former President Carter changed her life. “He’s a godsend person.”