'These Were Courageous Leaders'

Martin Luther King Jr.'s daughter Bernice tells Newsweek how her family aligned with the Carters in the fight for civil rights

- KATHERINE FUNG

BORN LESS THAN FIVE YEARS apart in Georgia, the late President Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King Jr. both came up during the civil rights movement, rising to the top of American politics to be remembered as statesmen of their time. And despite having never met, Carter and King would spend more than half a century tangled in a dance that would forever shape the legacy of the other.

“When I look at his life and I look at my father’s life, they both started from [a] different place,” Bernice King, the youngest daughter of the civil rights icon, told Newsweek in an interview following Carter’s death at 100 last month. “But in an interesting way, they both operated from a similar frame of reference, which was the belief that we can create a just, humane, peaceful and equitable world.”

For all the parallels between them, Carter and King took starkly different paths.

King, whose father was an influential pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and an early figure of the burgeoning civil rights movement, devoted his entire life to advancing civil rights for people of color. His protest actions, including marches for desegregation, the right to vote and labor rights, led to landmark legislative gains like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

Carter, meanwhile, would not be seen as a civil rights advocate until after he was inaugurated as governor of the Peach State in 1971.

The son of a white supremacist, Carter avoided taking controversial stances on race in the early years of his career. Although he was never known to say anything explicitly racist or aligned with his segregationist colleagues in the Georgia legislature, as a state senator, Carter also didn’t speak out in favor of the pivotal laws King helped pass, nor did he visit Ebenezer, not even when the church held King’s funeral in 1968.