NY Times: “You are a child of the Jim Crow South who grew up on a farm at a time when Black sharecroppers were hardly more than slaves. But even raised in that world, you understood the injustice of it. “The time for racial discrimination is over,” you said at your gubernatorial inauguration in 1971. Your audience audibly gasped, but for the rest of your political career, you worked to even the playing field for Black Americans.
As president, you saw all the ways government could improve the lives of Americans. You appointed more women and attorneys of color to the federal bench than all the earlier presidents combined. You pardoned Vietnam War draft dodgers. You brokered an unlikely peace deal in the Middle East. And when it was time to leave Washington, you went home to Plains.
I hope you know what it means to white Southerners like me, then and now, to have had your example at a time when there were vanishingly few role models among white Southerners. Or what it means to white Christians like me, then and now, to have had your example of what living by the Gospels really means.”