Finally thanking President Carter for a kind embrace

It’s not every day that you get to shake hands with a global leader, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former U.S. president, the Honorable Jimmy Carter who served from 19771981 — and even get a “love” hug.

That’s exactly what happened when an Uber driver picked up my wife, Billie, and I from the Marriott Marquis Hotel in downtown Atlanta about 8 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 19, for a 20-minute ride to The Carter Center, where we were scheduled to meet with President Carter precisely at 8:45 a.m. to discuss her father becoming the first African-American to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1949 — effectively “breaking the color barrier” of the venerable institution.

Indeed, before my fatherin-law, Lt. Commander Wesley A. Brown, passed away in 2012, just several years after a $54 million athletic center and field house was built and named in his honor, he’d often tell us a life-changing story (that I’ll briefly discuss below) that truly tells just how authentically empathetic Jimmy Carter was as a senior midshipman at the academy where my father-in-law endured as a lower class man so much racial discrimination, taunts, unjust demerits and the resulting punishments, as well as rooming alone for four years because of his black skin.

As the Uber vehicle whirled us through the Carter Center’s picturesque campus of maturing trees rooted in emerald grass stretching for acres, we were certainly excited and glad to be running ahead of schedule, especially since the facility’s senior director of research and faculty assistant, Dr. Steven Hochman, cautioned us during a Thursday phone call that the president was still on “military time” — in other words not to get to the appointment late.

Just moments after driving past the palatial presidential library, we were dropped off at the main lobby of the center’s sprawling executive suites, where we were met by senior aides, including Hochman (also a distinguished presidential historian who has written extensively about Carter) and Phil Wise (a lon-time Carter associate and vice president of operations and development), as well as Tony Clark, director of public affairs, who had an outstanding career as a broadcast journalist for the likes of CNN.

After being briefed, with the Secret Service placed at strategic points, we were led to President Carter’s office where he stood just beyond his office doorway with that famous ingratiating grin so familiar on campaign posters and political cartoons.

In his office, adorned with thick beige rugs, global art and pottery, etc., amid pastel-colored furniture, oil paintings and other images depicting family and others, he welcomed us, shook our hands and then warmly pulled my wife to him and hugged her, platonically asking her to “give me love!”

Man, that’s the downhome candor and wholesomeness that I so very much miss in today’s presidency.

We conversed with President Carter, today 94 years old and dressed in a dark buttoned suit, light blue shirt and turquoise Native-American medallion as a collar tie, about my fatherin-law’s time at the academy and career as a civil engineer. He remarked about my dad-in-law’s courageousness after being admitted to the Naval Academy in 1945, one year before the future president from Plains, Ga., would graduate in 1946 and move on to a stellar career as a nuclear submarine officer.

President Carter reminisced about their days on the track field, admitting that Commander Brown was “faster,” following his statement with a slight chuckle, one of the many developments that I wrote for my biography about my father-in-law in the Oxford University Press’ African American National Biography (AANB), edited by professors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Higginbotham of Harvard University.

At least two comprehensive biographies, as well as Carter’s own memoirs, attest to their associations.

My wife thanked him so much for being among a small group of midshipmen and Navy administrators determined to help my father-in-law, sponsored by the famous African-American congressman from Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., to become the first black to graduate from the academy after five other African Americans had been essentially hazed out of the institution starting not long after its founding in 1845 through to the 20th century.

Their paths crossed for only one academic year, but a monumental interaction with Carter would help provide the fuel that would have historic ramifications.

As the story goes, my father-in-law had a particularly rough day when that evening he was being ostracized in a dormitory. One upperclassman walked over to him, put his arm around his shoulder and essentially told my father-in-law that there were people on campus who were very interested in him graduating from the academy.

And that remarkable midshipman was none other than Jimmy Carter, a young man brought up in segregated Georgia whose own dad was a “segregationist,” despite reportedly having cordial relationships with the black community and whose mother, Lillian, insisted that he treat blacks and whites equally, something that Dr. Hochman discussed with us during a fascinating hour-long tour of the Carter Center following our conversation with President Carter.

Further, Carter’s association with blacks who worked his father’s peanut fields, as well as with Bishop William Decker Johnson of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, helped him to become familiar with the black liberation struggle, although Carter acknowledges that he did not actively participate in the civil rights movement, Hochman said.

And Carter, later on, after his father died, was pressured by local racists to join a group, the White Citizens’ Council, with Ku Klux Klan sympathies, utterly refusing to do so after returning to Plains to take over the family’s peanut farming enterprise, despite serious threats — another clear example of his noble character.

Ultimately, many of Carter’s top cabinet members and advisers were intimately involved in civil rights, including the ambassador to the United Nations, the Rev. Andrew Young, who served eight years as Atlanta’s mayor and was one of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s primary associates, Clark said, as we moved through exhibits in the presidential museum and library (with extensive archives) incorporating splendid graphics, audio-visual presentations and even an exact replica of Carter’s Oval Office in The White House.

In my book, President Carter is one of the greatest presidents of my lifetime because of his monumental efforts to instill peace in the Middle East via the 197879 Camp David Accords with the Egypt’s leader Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, his reputation as a Nobel Peace Prize recipient with remarkable intelligence, as well as staunch believer in African Americans’ struggles for racial justice.

And he greatly strengthened the voting rights legislation in Georgia and nationally that is being intentionally degraded today but makes it mandatory that all of us get out to vote during the upcoming Nov. 6 midterm elections.

His immense Christian faith, powerful 72-year marriage with his remarkable wife, Roslyn Carter, and their extensive international peace and health initiatives, as well as inner convictions that helped him to overcome segregationist pressures in the South and even brain cancer, all reflect his awesome qualities.

As I thought about our day at the Carter Center that evening, I remembered an exhibit that really caught my eye concerning his early campaigns as governor of Georgia, then president, accentuating that marvelous toothy grin on campaign buttons and posters for a man willing to give so much more — including an embrace of my father-inlaw that helped to change the course of American history.