- Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has passed away at the age of 100.
- This comes after reports of several falls the past few years and recently being placed in hospice care.
It has sadly been reported that former President of the United States Jimmy Carter has passed away at the age of 100. He has fallen several times in the last few years and needed stitches. He was also hospitalized and, in February, started receiving hospice care.
The 100-year-old died this Sunday while in hospice care surrounded by family at his home in Plains, Georgia. The Carter Center posted a simple statement online confirming the death of the beloved U.S. President, saying, “Our founder, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, passed away this afternoon in Plains, Georgia.”
Remembering President Jimmy Carter
Carter was our 39th President
Jimmy Carter was born on October 1st, 1924. Prior to becoming the 39th president of the United States, he pursued an education at Plains High School in Georgia before going on to attend the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland. He also began undergraduate coursework in engineering at Georgia Southwestern College.
He was granted admission into the Naval Academy by 1943 and graduated 60th out of 820 midshipmen in the class of 1946 with a Bachelor of Science degree. Carter became greatly interested in the U.S. Navy’s fledgling nuclear submarine program and was sent to the Naval Reactors Branch of the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D.C. for three-month temporary duty.
Carter started his career as a Senator
Carter’s political career began in 1963 when he was Georgia’s State Senator. This was when the civil rights movement was underway and Carter was a staunch supporter of racial tolerance and integration. He became the Governor of Georgia in 1971 and declared in his inaugural speech that “the time of racial discrimination is over. … No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity for an education, a job or simple justice.”
On December 12th, 1974, Carter announced that he would be running for president. His speech and his campaign consisted of themes of domestic inequality, optimism, and change. He was in office as sitting president from 1977 to 1981.
Carter ran for president again in 1980 but was beaten in a landslide against Republican president-elect Ronald Reagan. By 1982, Carter had founded the Carter Center, which was a non-governmental and non-profit organization with the purpose of advancing human rights, alleviating human suffering, and improving the overall quality of human life.
He and his wife, Rosalynn, also worked as volunteers at Habitat for Humanity, and they have also enjoyed hobbies such as painting, woodworking, and tennis in their spare time.
By mid-February 2023, Carter opted for hospice care following a series of short hospital stays. In pursuing this, he decided to forgo further medical treatments to “spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention,” the Carter Center said in a statement. At the time, the Carter Center did not specify what condition Carter was facing that prompted hospice care. In the past, he battled skin cancer melanoma that spread to his brain and liver; he announced the diagnosis in 2015 and continued to attend church while receiving treatment. Five months later, he announced he was cancer-free.
But in 2019, he also fell at least three times, one resulting in a broken hip and another requiring over a dozen stitches.
Even so, Carter worked right until the eve of his hospice enrollment, advocating for the conservation of Alaskan lands. In his beseeching statement, he summed up his own powerful life aptly, saying, “My name is Jimmy Carter. In my lifetime, I have been a farmer, a naval officer, a Sunday school teacher, an outdoorsman, a democracy activist, a builder, governor of Georgia and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. And from 1977 to 1981, I had the privilege of serving as the 39th president of the United States.”
Jimmy Carter is survived by his wife Rosalynn and his children, Amy, Donnel, Jack, and James.
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Take a look at Jimmy Carter’s presidential inaugural address from 1977 in the video below: