New Carter Center director off and running

Atlanta native Paige Alexander jumps right in on civil rights issues.

As Paige Alexander got off an international flight June 1 from Europe, PPE-clad officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention greeted her, asking if she had been to China or Iraq recently.

Driving down Peachtree Street to her parents’ house, she passed boarded-up businesses with broken windows — a result of the intense rioting that had taken place over the weekend after George Floyd’s death.

“That was my welcome to Atlanta,” Alexander said. “It’s like a dystopian movie where I have been cast as an extra.”

Fast forward a month, and the view from Alexander’s office, where she is the new CEO of the Carter Center, is anything but dystopian.

Birds play outside her huge bay windows as groundskeepers tend to the landscape of the international organization Alexander is charged with running.

She replaces the former CEO,

Ambassador Mary Ann Peters, who retired.

“For me, this is a homecoming,” said Alexander. She is an Atlanta native who graduated from Pace Academy in 1984.

“Coming back to the Carter Center is the only job I would have returned for, because it is a perfect combination of the political work I had done when I worked on campaigns, the policy work I have done in the U.S. government and the (nongovernmental organization) work I have done in Europe and here. The Carter Center embodies that. It also creates an opportunity to be active and to speak out, one of the things that mattered to the Carter Center, the Carters and to the staffers for a long time.”

Between arriving and her first day on the job on June 15, much happened locally, from the protests over the death of Floyd, and the local police killing of Rayshard Brooks followed by more protests, then voting problems in a bitter primary election that left many Black voters in Fulton and DeKalb counties feeling disenfranchised.

President Carter had already addressed the police killing of George Floyd, saying that he was pained by “tragic racial injustices and consequent backlash across our nation in recent weeks.”

Onher second dayonthe job, Alexander released a stinging statement from the Carter Centercalling for an end of the use of excessive force by police against African Americans.

It was one of the first times the Carter Center weighed in so heavily on a local issue.

“It is a time to be active. It is time for reckoning. It is nice to be

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CONTRIBUTED Between arriving June 1 in Atlanta and Carter Center CEO Paige Alexander’s first day on the job June 15, much happened locally, from racial-injustice protests to voting problems.