By BILL BARROWJimmy Carter is now 98 years old as he receives hospice care. His fellow Georgian, Martin Luther King Jr., would have been 94. The two men never met during their time in Atlanta. But the Rev. Bernice King tells The Associated Press that Carter has been a “courageous” and “principled” figure who built on her father’s work, advancing the King family's vision of racial equality and human rights. Jimmy Carter is now 98 years old as he receives hospice care.
Carter then shared a moment with Coretta Scott King, clasping hands and locking eyes with the widowed first lady of the Civil Rights Movement, their children looking on. Yet the alliance Carter later forged with the King family endured as he grew into a governor, president and global humanitarian who advanced racial equality and human rights.
Certainly, King would have expanded his own legacy with a longer life span — after civil rights victories for Black Americans he turned his focus to challenging Western militarism and rapacious capitalism — and there’s no way to know what kind of relationship King might have had with Carter once the Georgia Democrat reached high office.
Carter quoted many of the same theologians King cited in his practice of nonviolent resistance, and he would join King in 2002 as a Nobel Peace Prize winner. As a former president, Carter tracked King’s later economic observations, declaring the U.S. an oligarchy, rather than a fully functioning democracy, because of wealth inequality and money in politics.