When Jimmy Carter came to Sandtown
As the world considers the life of Jimmy Carter, his legacy in one Baltimore neighborhood is more than an important memory. It’s a witness to hope and possibility.
In 1992, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter came to the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood in West Baltimore to build homes with Sandtown Habitat for Humanity. At the time, there were some 1,000 vacant houses in the neighborhood, and the occupied rental houses were often substandard beyond words. Families frequently faced eviction for a few hundred dollars.
I know this because in 1986, I moved to Sandtown with Allan and Susan Tibbels and their daughters Jessica and Jennifer. We did so out of Christian faith and conviction to be neighbors, to turn our lives in a different direction. After a few years, we helped form a small new neighborhood church, and began to pray and dream together about how we could share in rebuilding our community.
One afternoon, from a pay phone, we called the office of Habitat for Humanity in Americus, Georgia. Amazingly, Millard Fuller, the co-founder and director of Habitat, was in and took the call. Allan explained our vision to eliminate vacant housing in Sandtown, not by tearing down, but by rebuilding, turning vacant properties into legacies of homeownership for Sandtown families.
Allan then made the pitch: Could we begin a Sandtown affiliate of Habitat for Humanity?
I’m glad it was a voice call and not a Zoom call like it might be today. Had it been so, Fuller would have seen that Allan was a quadriplegic in a wheelchair, I was a young pastor with wire-rim glasses, and our church was made up mostly of young people in the neighborhood. Hardly a typical construction team or traditional developers.
Fuller asked two questions. Would we pray for the work ahead? And did we have a dollar?
Yes, we would pray, and between us we had just one dollar.
We went to work, and after three years, we completed three homes — each safe, affordable, and an asset for a Sandtown family.
It was then we learned that Habitat for Humanity’s most famous volunteers, the 39th president and Mrs. Carter wanted to come and work in the neighborhood as part of their annual work with Habitat.
The plan was to build for a week, and the Carters would be there for a day, splitting their time with another city building week. We set a plan to start 10 houses for 10 Sandtown families.
But instead of announcing the house Carter would work on, or the 10 houses we would begin in Sandtown, we used the moment to announce a 100-House Project. Allan would lead the way with LaVerne Stokes, one of the Carter project’s new homeowners from the neighborhood.
Why not? We had completed
all of three homes. We had just one staff person and no money. Allan’s basement on Stricker Street was the warehouse, and neighborhood kids — like Fitt,
Ike, Gary, Jenny, Jessica, and Frank — were the construction team. Makes perfect sense!
I know a few people weren’t so sure, but I never heard any doubts in the neighborhood about what love, faith and a few construction tools could do.
In March 1992, the Carters came to Baltimore for a kickoff luncheon at the Hyatt Regency downtown. There was a full house with local leaders from business, politics, religion and philanthropy, including Mayor Kurt Schmoke and Robert Embry from the Abell Foundation, former members of President Carter’s administration. And the Enterprise Foundation (now known as Enterprise) was there as a vital partner.
But what we loved the most was how Sandtown filled the room. With few cars and limited
public transportation, people from Sandtown signed up and we rented buses for everyone to attend.
On Tuesday, June 16, the Carters returned, this time to work. With a huge tent set up on a then vacant lot, each morning began with singing, devotions, and then everyone being sent off with the words, “Let’s get to work” by Elder C.W. Harris, a pastor from the neighborhood. It was like a revival.
Jimmy Carter was a skilled carpenter and was easily the hardest worker of the day, as he and Mrs. Carter framed new walls for Sonia Streets’ home on North Gilmor Street. Sonia and Jimmy became friends; he insisted she call him “Jimmy.” After some more months of work, Sonia and her daughters moved from the Gilmor Homes to the home that Jimmy Carter helped her build.
In the years to come, Sonia would join the Carters around the world on annual Habitat work projects, and she referred to him as “my friend Jimmy Carter.” And while it took two decades, and thousands of people who rolled up their sleeves, those first three homes not only became 10 and then 100 homes, they became over 300 homes, nearly eliminating vacant houses in a 15-block area of Sandtown. The visit and hard work of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter was just the catalyst we needed.
Later in the evening on June
16, 1992, after a day working in the neighborhood, there was a celebration at New Shiloh Baptist Church. In the closing address from the pulpit, a sermon really, President Carter spoke passionately about the need for hope in our society, in our politics and in our churches.
But what I remember most is how he talked about what is important in life, about what endures, as St. Paul spoke in the second letter to the Corinthians. Following the biblical text, the things that last are what are unseen, Carter stressed, like justice, truth, fairness, service, humility, compassion, meekness and love. These are what endure. And this is why Sonia and Habitat for Humanity mattered to him.
“Depend upon the example of Christ,” Carter closed his remarks by saying, “and remember that the things that are great, that are lasting, that are gratifying, that are exhilarating, that are challenging, that are adventurous, are the things that you cannot see, and those are things that you can share with others.”
In Sandtown, we saw that Jimmy Carter sought to live what mattered. And that he and Sonia became friends, and that this is what endures.