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Jan. 4, 2025 17:56-18:57 - CSPAN
01:00:57
Fmr. President Carter Discusses Civil Rights
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jimmy carter
d 01:19
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
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The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum hosted a number of conversations on civil rights and individual freedom.
Next, former President Jimmy Carter talks to a former Ugandan war refugee who's now the CEO of the National Civil and Human Rights Center.
This is about an hour.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Welcome to a lovely day.
I want you to specifically thank President Carter for giving us this wonderful opportunity.
And he's healthy.
Look at him.
But I'm not as well-dressed as you are.
We'll talk about that later.
My name is Derek Kayungo, and I'm the CEO for the Center for Civil and Human Rights.
And I'm very proud to be here.
We're going to do a couple of things.
We're going to do some quick housekeeping.
Please take off your cell phones if you have one.
Into Vibrate, I think is what they call it these days.
And when we are done with the program, if you could still wait a little bit for me and the president to walk out, that would be lovely as well.
And then we'll have some Q ⁇ A after our little discussion.
So if you have any questions, write them down and pass them along, and we'll have them answered.
President Carter, we are so delighted to talk to you today, but there's a lot of things going on, as you can imagine.
I've heard about it.
And today's conversation is around rights and justice.
It's a national conversation that is really, really serious because we see a lot on TV right now.
And particularly around the Bill of Rights, which some of them include the 14th Amendment, which is civil rights.
And I was curious to see and hear from you what you think about civil rights today versus yesterday.
Well, recently I've been reading about the founding fathers.
I read a book about James Madison and Jefferson and Washington later just to see again after many years of study a long time ago about those early days of our own country.
And as you all may know, the first draft of the Constitution did not include the Bill of Rights, but they couldn't get enough states to ratify the Constitution of the United States until the Bill of Rights were added.
And so that was a very major undertaking.
And James Madison and others helped to draft those finally accepted 10 amendments to the Constitution known as the Bill of Rights.
That did not include everyone.
And it wasn't until after the Civil War when the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were passed.
And then let me ask you all, when did women get a right to vote in this country?
That's not right.
That's when white women got the right to vote.
That's a very important thing to remember because in 1920 the Constitution was passed, but when they said that women had a right to vote, well, you couldn't discriminate because of sex, it just really included white women.
And it wasn't until 30-something years later that The civil rights laws were passed when Lyndon Johnson was president after the civil rights movement, and African-American women also got the right to vote.
So that was an important issue.
And then the 24th Amendment came along later, and you didn't have to pay poll tax.
But until then, in the South and some southern states, you had to pay a poll tax in order to vote.
So you see that it's been a step-by-step progressive element.
I would say in the 60s and 70s, the United States kind of breathed a sigh of relief because Harry Truman, when I was on a submarine, ordained in 1948 that there would be no discrimination in the military forces or in the civil service.
And then that was about seven years before Rosa Park sat in the front of a bus, before Martin Luther King Jr. became famous as the leader of the civil rights movement.
And then, of course, as I mentioned earlier, when that was successful, then, of course, we basically passed the Civil Rights Act, and people all over the country could vote.
And I and most other leaders in our country kind of said, well, we've finally succeeded.
We finally provided for equality of treatment for all of our people.
That was a fairly brief period of relaxation and self-satisfaction and self-congratulations.
But we've seen lately, particularly with the abuse of mostly white policemen against African Americans and so forth, that we still have a long way to go.
So I would say that we've had kind of a relapse.
And nowadays, there seems to be another stirring of a deeper commitment by our country today.
And now look at ourselves and see what can be done about the rights for everyone.
And this includes the gays and lesbians and so forth, as well as people of different races.
So we are in a constant struggle in the United States of America to provide, I'd say, a beacon light for other nations to follow and for ourselves to benefit as well.
So it's been a long, continuing struggle that still goes on.
You know, at the Center for Civil and Human Rights right now, we are looking at turning that into a voting precinct.
And I have an interesting story around that.
When I worked for you as an election monitor when I was at Amnesty and went to Ethiopia to help them vote.
I remember those days.
I had been Sierra Leone, we went together.
I had never voted before.
I'm Ugandan and I had never had a chance to vote in my own country.
And I tell the story that I got a chance to vote for the first time in the United States.
And I woke up at 3 in the morning.
I was like the South Africans.
I was in line.
But the idea of an African young boy to come into this country and be afforded the same justices that regular born citizens were afforded was remarkable.
So now that we have this issue of voting going on, how do you feel about it?
It's a big election year.
We've had a large number of people turn out to vote this year.
Some new voters, I'd say Trump and Bernie Sanders that hadn't voted before in both parties.
But unfortunately, I would say within the Republican Party, particularly state by state, as they have become ascendant or domineering in the state legislature and in the governor's offices, they have tightened up the ability to vote by requiring complicated acquisition of an ID card.
And so this has discriminated against many people who are very poor, who've never had a driver's license.
I say older people who are in nursing homes that don't have a need to drive their own automobiles.
And so I think we still see a very deliberate move on the part of some people to exclude those that are not likely to vote for them.
When I was governor of Georgia, there was a pretty wide move throughout the country to increase the number of people who voted.
So in Georgia, we passed a law that was very interesting.
And we designated every high school principal in Georgia to be a voting registrar.
Every high school had a voting registrar as a head of a student body.
And every May or so, I would have a contest in Georgia while I was governor to see which high school could register the most new people to vote who just were approaching the age of 18.
When I got to the White House and attempted to do the same thing, I found that it was impossible.
Tip O'Neill, who was, I'd say, a liberal Democrat, finally came to me one day and said, Mr. President, you are not going to be successful with this because neither Democrats nor Republicans want to open up the rights to vote to a lot of new voters because they're in office because the presently qualified voters have put them there and they don't want a whole bunch of new, incomprehensible, unpredictable voters to come in and vote.
So it's a bipartisan bipartisan reluctance to let voting be open and free and universal.
For a long time, the Corda Center monitored all the elections in China, and there were a lot of them.
We just were restricted to the 650,000 small villages, which are not part of the Communist Party system.
And in China, in those little villages, everyone is automatically registered to vote when they reach the age of 18, which I think we should have in this country as well.
Men and women and so forth.
You don't have to be a member of the Communist Party.
And so that's the kind of thing that we need to do in this country is to let there be universal voting without going through any procedure once you reach the legal age to vote.
So that's part of the civil rights kind of issue.
We have the human rights, which are facing an affront around the world.
And I think what is really particularly perturbing is this idea that people feel that rights around the world are being denied.
And you are involved heavily in this subject matter.
The Corda Center is yet.
The Carter Center is from the Middle East, from Southern Africa, and all these are.
What do you think about when you think about human rights today versus yesterday?
That's been a very disappointing thing.
I'm not just being critical today, but I think the best thing to do is to point out opportunities for improvement rather than just bragging what we've done.
We had an era when I was in the Navy of reaching for greatness in moral and ethical values as human beings.
It's only happened once in history, so far as I know.
And that was immediately after the Second World War, when perhaps 80 million people were killed.
And we, in 1945 in San Francisco, we assembled about 45 nations or so, the ones that were victorious in the war primarily, and they established the human, the United Nations with the idea of peace.
Peace.
jimmy carter ▲ ● ▼
And the United Nations and its Security Council were designed so that it would prevent wars in the future.
unidentified
A few years later, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed and adopted with some caveats.
The South Africans wouldn't agree for blacks to vote.
Russia would not permit free leaving Russia and so forth.
So a few caveats.
But most of the time, people voted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
jimmy carter ▲ ● ▼
And I would say that at that moment, human beings looked at the combined commitment of the great religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and so forth, and Hinduism.
unidentified
And they took the finest elements of every one of those great religions and put them down into 30 brief paragraphs that comprised the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
And that was almost a perfect picture of how everybody should be treated equally, with equal rights.
So the United Nations Security Council has abandoned its commitment to peace.
If you're a powerful nation with a permanent member and you have a right to veto, you can do almost anything.
And the Security Council will not condemn you.
I think the United States has sent armed troops to about 30 countries to fight under the general approbation or approval of the United Nations since the Second World War.
And other countries can do the same thing if they're powerful enough.
And I wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times a few years ago, two years ago, that showed that the United States is now violating at least 10 of the 30 paragraphs in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
A lot of those relate to the discrimination against women who are supposed to be equal.
It's not just blacks being equal to whites and so forth.
So I think we have a long way to go still.
We need to reassess the basic purpose of the United Nations to be for peace, not armed conflict to resolve issues and commit ourselves, recommit ourselves to the basic principles of human rights.
And I would urge all of you to just call up on Google Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and you'd see it, you can read it in a half a minute, a couple minutes.
There's 30 paragraphs, and it spells out what you should do on human rights.
And it's easily violated, and it's easily justified, particularly after something like 9-11, the United States clamped down and took away our own civil rights, including some of mine.
That's true.
As far as freedom of knowing information of your own sort.
And so we have a long way to go.
There's an interesting lady in the audience here today, Mrs. Abenathi.
And she and I were talking over lunch, and she was talking about, she was recounting her husband's work and everybody's work in the civil rights movement.
And I was thinking how that connects to the human rights movement.
Do you as a Georgian feel proud of what the state has gone through and has worked through the civil rights movement?
Because you're apparently the home of the civil rights movement, am I right?
Yes, pretty much.
Yeah.
jimmy carter ▲ ● ▼
Well, you know, Martin Luther King Jr. is from Georgia and we are very proud of what he did and his family did and the people with associated with him.
unidentified
But there was a time during the 50s when Georgia was very negative on the civil rights movement and we condemned Martin Luther King Jr. as a communist and somebody that was trying to overthrow or change the basic structure of the federal government, of the U.S. government.
jimmy carter ▲ ● ▼
And for 100 years, we had legal discrimination against black people.
unidentified
From 1865, you might say almost to 1965, it was a combined commitment of churches and the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court and the American Bar Association all said it's okay to discriminate against African Americans and to consider the whites are superior.
jimmy carter ▲ ● ▼
So that was a major accomplishment for him and for those heroes who were in the civil rights movement.
unidentified
And Georgia was one of the few southern states that didn't oppose the change in integrating our schools, for instance, after the Supreme Court ruled that they should be no longer separate but equal.
Other states had leaders in Arkansas and so forth that stood in the schoolhouse door and in some cases the U.S. had to send arms troops down to make them comply.
So we've had a good chance in this state to do well.
And of course recently with the LGBT legislators that was passed by the legislature and the governor very wisely vetoed that legislation.
So we kind of distinguish now against North Carolina, who in the past has been quite enlightened on civil rights.
But it shows that we have another battle to fight after the race issue is, we hope someday will be resolved equally.
I think we have the challenge of dealing with gay people and lesbians and transgender people.
Two more questions before we go to the audience.
There's this need by youth today to be part of the petitioning for rights.
And you see that in the Black Lives Matter expression and you see that in the kids in Africa who are speaking out and you see Brazil is having a rough time, Argentina, everybody is having a rough time.
How do the youth today take this mantle of rights and do it in a way that is respectable and also influential?
If the young people don't do it, it won't be done.
You know, it's a young people, say, just take, for instance, college age, whether you're in college or not.
That's a time in a human being's formative years when they have a maximum degree of considering new ideas from their classmates, from their professors, from reading more extensively than they have in the past.
And they also are unbound by preserving the status quo.
Almost as soon as you graduate from college, you lose a substantial part of your human freedom.
If you get a job with Delta Airlines or Coca-Cola Company or a bank, or if you get a job teaching school, you have to comply with the policies of your corporation or the school system.
And you leave that, and you lose that freedom that you had on the college campus to speak out with a single voice or get four or five people to join you, or maybe 40 or 50, to join you.
And so that's when there's a stirring of self-analysis, I would say maybe conscience.
And you say, what can I do to improve this world?
But that is very quickly stamped out when you get a job or when you start having to support a family, whether you're a boy or girl, a man or woman.
So I think that that's why that in almost every country on earth, it's the young people who have started the revolutions that have brought about changes or improvements in society.
Do you think today in the United States we're doing a good job bringing up kids that understand moral attitude?
I think so.
I believe on most college campuses, just for instance, and I'm including their peer groups who may not be in college, there is an effort in most college campuses,
not all of them, to originate new ideas and new concepts and to encourage the students to adopt higher ideals or higher aspirations of moral values and ethical values and to question the political arrangement or the societal arrangements in which they were grown up.
And as I said earlier, when you get to be older than they are and start having the family your own, you don't want to rock the boat.
You don't want to endanger your own job.
You don't want to become unemployed when you've got a wife or children to take care of and so forth.
jimmy carter ▲ ● ▼
So I would say that in the United States now we have an adequate degree of stirring or opportunities on the campus to speak out in an innovative or sometimes even a semi-revolutionary way.
unidentified
Those of you who have questions, please.
Uh-oh, there's one up there.
I don't see very well, but yes.
As the leader of the administration that set up a separate Department of Education, and congratulations on that.
Do you think we would benefit and would you favor mandatory courses in the curriculum, perhaps as early as elementary school, on human and civil rights, conflict negotiation, conflict resolution, and negotiation?
That's a hard question for me to answer.
Because, you know, I think when you start having the federal government, I presume you say, to mandate that you have to have this or that course for fourth graders or eighth graders or seniors in high school, that kind of interferes with the basic commitment I have to let local people decide on their own curriculum.
But I would say that there should be within every school a basic social science class showing the history of human rights, which we've just covered in a few minutes in this forum, and also encourages students to learn about what their own country is doing.
Yes, I think it would be a good idea.
But I think you have to be careful not to intrude too much on the local Board of Education's right to set their own curriculum.
Thank you.
Yes.
Mr. President, thank you for being here today.
You have lived a long and full life, and the world has changed so much in your lifetime.
We're looking at the past in the archives, but we're also looking at the future.
What tenets or what framework should we look at the future to kind of stage the debate as we deal with this changing world we live in today?
Well, I grew up during the Great Depression years on a farm.
All my neighbors were African American, and all my playmates were black.
The ones with whom I worked in the field were black.
And until I was a teenager, I never realized that they had mandatorily separate and unequal schools.
I never realized that their parents couldn't vote.
I never realized that my playmates' parents couldn't serve on the jury, that they were deprived of basic rights.
And so it was a time for me to learn all about that.
And I believe we have an obligation now as adults to make sure that our children understand not only the highest ideals of what a society should be, to provide equal opportunity, equal rights to everyone, but also to look at the history of successes in the past and to glorify the champions, like Andy Young and Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks and others that I need not mention.
David Carter?
Well, I'd say Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman.
You know, because I had boycotts operating against my business, but I never did have a threat to my life and so forth like others have had.
But anyway, to teach the history of what has been done in the past, and we could all, just within our own families, we can exalt those who were so heroic and forthinking in the past and brought about changes, but also to point out that their achievements have not been perpetuated because of the natural tendency of every one of us to feel superior to somebody else.
You know, we all have an element of pride ingrained within us that I am at least better than somebody else.
I'm at least better than a drug addict.
I'm at least better than an alcoholic.
I'm at least better than a prisoner.
I'm at least better than maybe a black person.
I'm at least better than a woman.
You know, we have those misconceptions that at least we are better than somebody else.
But we need to guard them against that.
But I think that can be done, obviously, within a home better if we, and also to some degree, as gentlemen suggested here in the school climate.
Yeah.
There are yellow cards in your program, so we will have people collect those so we can grab these questions and get them on the air.
We also have, we are webcasting this, so we have people who are tweeting, who are sending questions as well at different schools.
And so there are volunteers coming around to collect these, and we will bring them to you to read so that they can get on nerves.
But I've got to go to a Willie Nelson concert tonight.
Well, I hope I can come.
While we wait for the collection of questions and some of the things, one of the biggest things that is interesting right now is the subject matter around religion.
Yes.
And I think that some people now are either happy or sad that the new mayor of London happens to be a Muslim.
I spent last week in London, and so I was able to join in the celebration of most people that he was elected.
How do you think that is different from us and this and our passions around this particular?
Well, This young man is quite highly qualified, and I don't think anybody doubted about it, and he won, without any equivocation, he won a clear victory, although he is a Muslim.
And London society, just from observing people in the parks and on the streets, is quite diverse now and becoming more so.
But I think he, with the present quandary in which Europe finds itself closing its doors to refugees because many of them happen to be Islamic in their faith, I think this has been a clear, good signal for all of Europe to observe.
And so I'm very pleased with that.
In fact, most people don't know that in our Congress we do have a congressman who happens to be Muslim and one who happens to be Buddhist, who happens to be in this room today.
But here's a question for you from the audience.
How do we impress upon younger generation, first-time eligible voters, that change has actually occurred, even though we have more work to do?
And how do we restore hope?
Well, it's hard to answer that question.
How do we convince the young people?
But in our schools and our family life, which I mentioned earlier, we can certainly outline the history of the struggle for human rights, because a lot of people think that the human rights that we presently enjoy have always been with us, particularly in the United States of America.
And we don't realize that for many years, women could not vote, and black women could not vote till much later, and that people who didn't pay taxes could not pay poll taxes could not vote.
We don't realize.
And even our original Constitution didn't have any Bill of Rights in it.
So I think the first segment of our session here is a quick history that we ought to share with our young people.
This is an interesting one.
It's around the idea of power.
And there's power corrupt, absolutely.
Is power corrupt inherently is the first question.
Yes, what?
Power.
Corrupt inherently.
This current election season has, in my opinion, in the person's opinion, shown that there is no need for super PACs.
No need for super PACs?
Yeah.
Like was ordained by the Supreme Court with Citizens United.
I think they're talking about the ones that go behind your back when you're campaigning.
I think one of the stupidest decisions that the Supreme Court has ever made was Citizens United, where they ordained that a corporation had the same characteristics under the Constitution as a human being.
And now we have massive infusions of money into the political campaigns.
When I ran for office, it was completely different.
You know, we raised money just a few dollars at a time, and there was a limit on what anybody could contribute.
When I ran in the general election against Gerald Ford, who was an incumbent president, and later against the challenger, Ronald Reagan, you know how much money I raised for the general election?
Zero.
Zero.
I didn't have to raise any money.
We accepted the $1 per person that a taxpayer can indicate on his tax return form.
You can check a little check.
You have to do it yourself.
And that puts a dollar in the pot.
So Gerald Ford and I shared the money that was in that pot.
We didn't ask a single contributor to give us money.
And now we have what I would call legal bribery in this country.
Because every candidate, Every candidate for Congress, for governor, for U.S. Senator, for president, has to go out to people and ask for money.
And you can't get elected if you ain't considered to be a nominee for president unless you can raise one or two hundred thousand dollars or even more.
And so I think that has deteriorated our own electoral system in this country far below the standards that the quarter center requires when we monitor elections.
We wouldn't dream of monitoring an election in a country that had the same rules that the United States has.
We've done more than 100 troubled elections, and we require that they have a central election commission, so the same voting all over the country.
The United States lets every county decide basically how people vote, you know, with punch cards and that sort of thing.
And in other countries, we require that all of the qualified candidates have equal access to radio and television advertisement, whereas in our country we have to buy it.
So I would say that Citizens United ruling was a great setback to inherent democracy in our country, not just to the election process, but the entire gamut of democracy, because it makes every successful elected candidate in the Congress almost obligated to certain special interests for access and to answer their questions and to take advice on how to vote on crucial issues.
I think it's been a terrible setback.
And it's all recent.
Yeah.
The next one is, what recommendations, in addition to voting, do you have for ordinary citizens to change the discourse among elected officials in Washington, D.C.
Well, we have, along with that process has come the polarization of parties in Washington, D.C. In addition to the massive effusion of money into the campaign that I've already covered, we also have gerrymandering.
When a Republican or Democratic state legislature gets dominant, if the governor is the same party particularly, then they can contrive very complicated delineations of voting districts.
Maybe in a certain state like Georgia, they want to put all the black people in the same districts and let them have a few black congressmen who are Democrats.
And then the vast majority of the citizens, about 60 or 65% or so, will be in the other districts and they're basically Republican and white.
So this is done all over the country.
That's something that the Congress could change if it want to, but they don't because they have benefited from it.
They're one in Congress now.
But that's something that the Supreme Court could rule.
I think the Supreme Court could rule quite easily that there should be a blue-ribbon commission, for instance, of obviously balanced composition that would decide on the delineation of districts.
I think two states have this requirement.
And that's something that so gerrymandering between tribing districts and a massive new addition of money has been the two worst things and that has resulted in negative advertising.
I never dreamed of having a negative commercial against one of my opponents for president.
You know, if I had, I would have been the one that people would have condemned.
You shouldn't cast aspersions on your opponent's character.
Now, that's where a lot of the money goes that you raise.
You can raise all these millions of dollars and you spend them on commercials and you try to tear down the reputation of your opponent.
So the people get a bad impression of both candidates, and then Republicans begin to despise Democrats and vice versa.
When they get to Washington, they still despise each other.
And so you have almost 100% Republicans who will vote against anything President Obama asked for.
And so the basic debates take place in the party caucuses.
The Republicans all go to their caucus and they decide how to vote, and then they almost have to vote 100% the way the majority says.
We used to debate when I was president.
You know, on the floor of the House and Senate, we should have long and very exciting debates to conclude a decision.
That's no longer excellent.
So I'm being very critical of a political process and the government in my country.
I feel that way.
I don't apologize for it.
This one puts you and I on the sport.
Uh-oh.
Read another one.
Go ahead.
I'll try.
It says, Thank you for your call to action for the liberation and dignity for women.
What is your message to men who don't think they are sexist, but who support language and policies that oppress women?
Well, I really would like for everybody who's interested in basic human rights or decency or moral values to read the book that I wrote about the oppression of women.
It is the worst human rights crime on earth.
And the people who perpetrate and enforce discrimination against women are basically men.
A lot of these men are religious leaders, where early in my religion, happens to be Christianity, women were deacons and prophets and spiritual leaders of all kinds, as expressed by St. Paul in his letter.
Delaney gave you names of them.
And then after a few years, though, within the Christian community, men became dominant, and over a period of time, women are excluded from roles in churches, which gives a signal to everyone that in the eyes of God, men are superior, or women are inferior.
If a woman can't be a deacon in the church, or a woman can't be a chaplain, a woman can't be a priest, then this indicates that in the eyes of God, women are not qualified to be a deacon or chaplain or priest.
And so, if a husband wants to dominate his wife or even abuse his wife, he says, well, if the church doesn't think my wife is equal to me, why should I treat her as an equal?
And if an employer wants to cheat his women employees by paying her less than a man, they can say, maybe subconsciously, if God doesn't think she's equal to me, why should I treat her as equal to my men workers?
So you see, it permeates society.
And also the element of violence, since I've already blamed the United Nations Security Council for encouraging or condoning violent acts instead of peace, this is also a factor in the abuse of women and girls, where dominant soldiers, primarily men, perpetrate horrible crimes of rape with bayonets and bottles and things of that kind.
It's a horrible thing to talk about.
in some cases involving United Nations troops and involving troops from countries that volunteer to fight for the United Nations.
So this is terrible.
And in my own country, Atlanta, Georgia, I would say is one of the most heavily trafficked places in our country in selling slaves.
We have the largest airport on earth, and a lot of our passengers come in from the southern hemisphere.
And a lot of the passengers brought in here are dark-skinned or African-American, and they can be sold very cheaply to a brothel.
The average price for a female sex worker who's dark-skinned is only $1,000.
And the New York Times did an analysis about a year ago or so that showed that a brothel owner can get $36,000 a year profit from her.
So there are between 200 and 300 girls sold into slavery in Atlanta every month.
And we have discrimination in our military forces as well.
So it's not just other countries that are guilty.
It's our country as well.
And we know that we have a similar serious problem on college campuses with sexual abuse being prevalent.
And rarely, rarely, even on the most enlightened campuses, and I've spoken at Harvard and Yale and Princeton as well as other colleges.
And they have a serious problem on those campuses as well.
And rarely is a rapist on a college campus expelled.
And the Justice Department says that over half of the sexual abuse on a campus is perpetrated by rapists who, once they get on a college campus, know that they can satisfy their sexual desires without punishment, with impunity.
So they become habitual rapists.
So this is what we need to correct in our own country.
And in foreign countries, you have women whose sexual organs are abused with horribly mutilated, and you have honor killings and other things which our country is not guilty of.
But it happens in every country around the world.
So it's the worst overall human rights abuse there is, and the men are responsible for it.
It's the same thing that we had during the civil rights time.
A lot of white people felt that discrimination or segregation was not right.
But we benefited from it.
We got the best jobs.
We got the best education.
We were the ones that determined the outcome of a jury case.
So why should we give up this privilege, even though we know it's wrong?
And now men benefit from the discrimination against women, so why should we speak out about it?
Why should we change the status quo that gives us a superior position in society?
So men are responsible to answer your question.
It's a long answer.
I'm sorry.
We have a few more before we close.
This one is a little bit easier.
Thank you.
And it's for the both of us.
And it talks about our upbringings.
I find ourselves in an intersection.
You have a little African boy over here from Uganda.
I want to hear about that.
Who left the country as a former refugee during Edi Meet's time.
And at London, Kenya, where I grew up, and I was raised by an American woman from Pittsburgh, Marge Campbell.
She's the one who taught me how to drink iced tea.
Being British raised, I was used to high tea.
So I thought she forgot to cook the tea.
And then she taught me how to eat cookies.
And the British eat biscuits.
Now that I live here, I know that Americans give biscuits to dogs.
Americans are so controversial.
I also had biscuits for breakfast.
You have different kinds of biscuits in your business.
That's right.
It's a baked kind of thing.
I understand that, yeah.
Yeah.
And so then I got to this country and I checked into a hotel and the hotel had three bars of soap.
Facial soap, hand washing soap, and body soap.
What's the difference?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I grew up with octagon soap.
I don't know if anybody has it.
But I don't know the difference between the three soaps.
I guess it's a matter of perfuming or something.
Marketing, that's it.
Sell more soap if you can get people to the street up again.
But Americans are bougie like that.
Esther, I don't disagree.
So then I end up grade school adverts and start the company, the Global Soap Project, that recycles all the soap, gives it to the Center for Disease Control and others care to refugee camps back at home.
And now I find myself at the helm of the Center for Civil and Human Rights.
That's my little story.
What is your little story?
Well, to start with, soap, we used to make our own soap on the farm.
And that was a big project that we had.
Every time we killed hogs, we made soap.
So I grew up with a similar background to yours, but in a different part of the world.
And now I go into the hotels that have it.
But as I said earlier, I think I was lucky that I just happened to grow up in a community that was African-American.
And my mother was a registered nurse, and she was gone away a lot.
She sometimes worked 20-hour duty from 2 o'clock in the morning until 10 o'clock at night.
She only got off four hours a day.
And she got paid ostensibly $6 a day for 20 hours.
So we didn't see my mother very much.
And so I was basically raised by African-American women.
And all my playmates were African-American as well.
So I benefited ultimately from my mother's enlightened attitude toward the race issue, regardless of the mores and customs of the times.
And I think that's where I got my glimpse of what should be done about civil rights at home and human rights on a broad basis.
But I've seen the tremendous benefits that can come from opening up an opportunity for people to exhibit their human rights.
One of the practical things was in South America.
Before I was president, most of the countries in South America were military dictatorships.
And they were in bed with the presidents of the United States and with the corporations in the United States because they were the ones that controlled the iron ore and the bauxite and bananas and pineapples that came from there.
And to get a monopoly on those products was a great boon to our country and to our corporations who shared them.
And so whenever one of those dictators was threatened by dissenting voices within his own country from indigenous Indians or from former slaves or from just poor people, the United States would send troops down there to protect our friend, the dictator.
jimmy carter ▲ ● ▼
So in Colombia and Peru and Argentina and Chile and Brazil and Uruguay and Paraguay and so forth from almost all those countries, we had military dictatorships.
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When I established a human rights policy and began to protect the rights of those poor and deprived and weak people to speak up, within 10 years every country in South America became a democracy.
So that's what I'm saying is this is a practical indication of the benefits of just theoretically helping from a distance for people to have a chance to speak their own mind and to elect their own leaders.
So that's part of my background.
So now I have a little, I have two kids that I know of at least.
Yeah.
I don't know what you mean by that, but I won't.
My wife is over there, so Kevin Kayongo is growing up as a new American.
And when I tell him, Kevin, we are Africans.
How old is Kevin?
Kevin is 16 now.
He's 6'4.
And he plays basketball and he's a classically trained pianist.
Oh, really?
You should have brought him along.
Yeah.
I'm going to bring him next year.
Bring him back.
Then I have Lauren, who is 11.
Yes.
And she's elegantly tough now, because girls are different at that point.
I love her to death.
How do I take these two American kids and inspire them to understand that the country they live in is a remarkable country because we hear so much about the U.S. being a bad country and things are horrible and things are falling apart.
How do we inspire hope right now?
Well, I think there's a lot of reason for hope.
You know, our country has learned the hard way.
And the best thing, a characteristic of America that gives me hope is the fact that we have such a heterogeneous population.
The United States is not a melting pot.
I think it's more of a mosaic, where each individual still has a shining, bright, different color or different characteristic.
And when you put them all together, you have a group of courageous innovators that wanted to go to a foreign country to improve themselves or to demonstrate a commitment to a higher ideal, freedom of religion or whatever it was.
And so we still have that inherent characteristic in our country.
So, what we've had over now 230 years or so is not only the ability but the proved commitment to improve ourselves.
We make mistakes, but because we are a free society, our mistakes become increasingly apparent.
We've already discussed some of them today.
And when those mistakes become adequately apparent to a majority of our people with a free voice in a democracy, they are self-correcting.
So I think that's what gives us hope.
And we've seen, I've seen, and you've seen too, in the half more, less than half of my lifetime, I say since the 1960s, we've seen African Americans treated not only equally, but because of their superior quality in a superior way in basketball, baseball, and football and so forth.
And so that has given the rest of society who's not interested in sports the realization that we all are equal in God's eyes and in our capabilities.
So some people have superior qualities and others don't.
So I would say that your children, particularly six foot four already, has got a good future ahead of him.
I think he'd probably get a scholarship in most colleges.
I'm a trustee on a local college in Georgia.
The college, by the way, is Mercer University.
And I'm a trustee now, but two years ago, Mercer, with 4,000 students, beat Duke and basketball.
So we could open the door for your son.
But I think there's plenty of opportunity for hope.
Thank you.
This one is from online.
We have about three more of these.
Women earn less than men.
How do you suggest we change this?
Or the second question you could tackle is: is it a right of an elected official to refuse to consider a Supreme Court nominee?
Take one of those.
I think that the U.S. Senate Republicans have made a serious mistake in not considering the nominee for the Supreme Court that's been put forward by President Obama.
They don't have to approve the very worthy candidate.
But if the Judicial Committee would meet and say no and then present the name to the Senate and they vote and say no, that would be okay with me.
But I think to just refuse as though Obama was already out of office when he had almost a year to go when the vacancy occurred, I think that's a wrong and a mistake.
It doesn't violate the Constitution or the laws, but I think it violates the spirit of our country and sets a bad example for the future.
So I think I've answered that question adequately.
Yeah.
Well, let's talk about some concluding remarks.
Okay.
I'm inspired every day by different people.
And in the room today, we also have My board member at the Center for Civil and Human Rights and her husband, Andrea is Andrew Young's daughter.
Andy Young's daughter?
Yeah.
Andrea, which one?
She's out there, is she?
There she is.
And her husband, Jerry, right there.
All right.
You got a good boss then.
And every time I look at her, she inspires me.
Who inspires you?
What inspires you these days?
Well, I was inspired by her father, Andy Young, and I still am.
He set a moral and ethical standard for me as a president in dealing equitably with the people who lived in Africa.
And he did it in a quiet way without preaching to me, although he's a preacher, and by just suggesting that we do it.
And when Andy went on his first trip to Africa as my ambassador to the United Nations, you know, he went there with just one purpose, that is to say, not what we want you to do, but what can the United States do for you?
And that was Andy's idea.
And he's gracious enough to give me credit for it, but it was his idea.
So there's still a lot of heroes that I have.
Nelson Mandela was a great friend of mine.
I was one of his intimate circle, and he's been to the Cordova Center, and I've worked on human rights programs and other things.
So there are a lot of heroes still coming along.
I say one, just to get throwing, I started to say throw in a white person, but he's not white, and that was Anwar Sadat.
But he wasn't white either.
But a white person that made a great impact on me was my early school superintendent, Miss Judy Coleman.
And I would say Admiral Rickov, who was Jewish, but he was my, except for my mother and father, he had more influence on my life.
So, you know, so we have plenty of heroes that we can look upon.
And so we don't need to look very far for inspiration.
But I happen to be religious.
I believe, you know, I think the ultimate standard of perfection for a human being is the life of Jesus Christ.
And that's what I teach the Bible every Sunday morning in my little church.
So we can look at ancient times, 2,000 years ago.
We can look in recent years and see people who've exhibited with human courage and wisdom the highest ideals that should guide us all.
Well, before I thank you for what has been a wonderful and powerful hour with a sagacious man of morality and kindness, I wanted to say you are my hero.
Oh, thanks.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
I'm going to introduce.
It's hard to see here.
Is Dr. Meredith Evans here?
Meredith.
Okay, I want everybody to recognize.
Stand up again.
You've been very busy.
Meredith.
She's the director of our library and museum, and she's, of course, she occupies a very important place in my life as well.
And I wanted to recognize her.
Wow, well, that's fine.
Thank you, Meredith, very much.
Thank you.
Well, again, thank you so much for coming and being with us.
We want to thank the museum for hosting us, Ambassador Peters for being with us, and for everyone here who is a distinguished guest and honored guest.
Remember, these are wonderful moments.
Treasure them and know that they don't come back.
So I wish we were more of us here to listen to a voice of perfection, President Carter Asante-San.
Thank you very much.
Have a day.
Thank you, everybody.
So wait for us to come out.
Jimmy Carter died on Sunday, December 29th at the age of 100.
Here are some of the events and services that will lead up to his burial.
He is now lying in repose at the Carter Center in Atlanta.
Tuesday, the family travels to the U.S. Capitol in Washington, where the former president will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.
The public will be invited to pay their respects starting at 7 p.m. that evening and throughout Wednesday.
At 9.30 a.m. on Thursday, President Carter's remains will be taken to Washington National Cathedral for a funeral service there.
Later in the day, the former president travels south to be buried at the Carter family home in Georgia.
We'll show these events live on C-SPAN networks, streaming online at c-span.org and on the free C-SPAN Now video app.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum involving you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington, D.C. to across the country.
Coming up Sunday morning, Democratic strategist Martha McKenna and Republican strategist Mike Reache discuss the incoming Trump administration, the new Congress, and political news of the day.
And then the Cato Institute's David Beer talks about the H-1B visa program, foreign workers, and their impact on the U.S. economy.
Join the conversation live at 7 Eastern Sunday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at cspan.org.
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It's a process.
A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles.
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