Jimmy Carter’s coffin travels to Atlanta as 39th US president’s funeral begins

Jimmy Carter’s extended public farewell has begun in Georgia, with the 39th US president’s flag-draped coffin tracing his long arc from the Depression-era South and family farming business to the pinnacle of American political power and decades as a global humanitarian.

Those chapters shone throughout the opening stanza of a six-day state funeral intended to blend personalised memorials with the ceremonial pomp afforded to former presidents.

The longest-lived US executive, Mr Carter died on December 29 at the age of 100.

“The two of them together changed the world. And it was an amazing thing to watch so close.”

Grandson Jason Carter, who now chairs the centre’s governing board, said: “It’s amazing what you can cram into a hundred years.”

Mr Carter’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren accompanied their patriarch as his hearse rode first on Saturday through his home town of Plains, which at about 700 residents is not much bigger than when Mr Carter was born there on October 1 1924.

The procession stopped at the farm where the future president toiled alongside the black sharecroppers who worked for his father.

The motorcade continued to Atlanta, stopping in front of the Georgia Capitol where Mr Carter served as a state senator and reformist governor.

Finally, he arrived for his last visit to the Carter Presidential Centre, which houses his presidential library and The Carter Centre where he based his post-White House advocacy for public health, democracy and human rights, setting a new standard for what former presidents can accomplish after they yield power.

“His spirit fills this place,” Jason Carter told the assembly that included some of the centre’s 3,000 employees worldwide.

Pallbearers on Saturday came from the Secret Service that protected the Carters for almost half a century and a military honour guard that included navy servicemembers for the only US Naval Academy graduate to reach the Oval Office.

A military band played Hail To The Chief and the hymn Be Thou My Vision for the commander in chief who was also a devout Baptist.

His longtime personal pastor, the Rev Tony Lowden, remembered not a president but the frail man who spent the last 22 months in hospice care, “wrapped in a blanket” that included the words of Psalm 23.

Chip Carter recalled “the boss” he had to make an appointment to see in the Oval Office, but also the father who spent an entire Christmas break learning Latin and teaching his 8th-grade son who had failed a test.

When he took that test again, the younger Carter said, he aced it.

Jimmy Carter will lie in repose at the Carter Presidential Centre from 7pm local time on Saturday until 6am on Tuesday, with the public able to pay respects around the clock.

National rites will continue in Washington and conclude on Thursday with a funeral at Washington National Cathedral, followed by a return to Plains.

There, the former president will be buried next to his wife of 77 years near the home they built before his first state senate campaign in 1962.

The Carters lived nearly all their lives in Plains, with the exception of his naval service, four years in the Governor’s Mansion and four years in the White House.

As his hearse rolled through the town, mourners lined the main street, some holding bouquets of flowers and wearing pins bearing images of the former president and his signature smile.

“He was ahead of his time on what he tried to do and tried to accomplish.”

It was his 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 Mr Carter as hailing from a bygone era of American politics.

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

Mr Browner said it meant “a great deal” to have a president come from a small southern town like his, something he says is not likely to happen again.

In Plains, the motorcade passed near where Mr 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 Mr Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign headquarters, a barebones effort that depended on public financing, dwarfed by the billion-dollar US presidential campaigns of the 21st century.

The procession passed the home where Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter both died.

It is the same 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 honoured 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 Mr Carter was a boy, as the old farm bell rang 39 times to honour Mr Carter’s place as the 39th president.

Beside the house is the tennis court that Mr Carter’s father, James Earl Carter, built for the family, a nod to the blend of privilege and hard rural life that defined the future president’s upbringing.

Mr 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.