Jimmy Carter funeral latest: Former president to lie in state at US Capitol Rotunda – UK Times

The last time a Democratic president died was in 1973 when Lyndon Baines Johnson passed away at the age of 64, just a few years after leaving office.

Following the death of Jimmy Carter at the age of 100, the nation will now see the first funeral for a Democratic president in more than 50 years.

There are a number of traditions and customs that govern the death of a US president, but the wishes of the family are also heavily considered, meaning the proceedings can be quite different from each other.

The death of Jimmy Carter on Sunday is causing many Americans to look back at the political legacy of the nation’s 39th president.

And what is now known about how that legacy was shaped angers many in his party to this day.

Carter came to the presidency at the end of a chaotic decade in American life, as the U.S. still bore the scars of the bloody culmination of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, with the tragic assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy. The country also faced desperate economic problems, stemming from an OPEC boycott of the U.S. in the Middle East and persistent inflation at home.

On Saturday, 4 May 1974, Jimmy Carter took the stage at the University of Georgia School of Law to address an audience that included lawyers, journalists and the Democratic Party luminary Ted Kennedy. At the time, Carter was governor of Georgia but could not run for reelection, so was starting to mull a longshot bid to become the next President of the United States.

He used his speech to tear into the justice system in his own state and other parts of the country, arguing bluntly that it favored the rich and powerful at the expense of everybody else. Carter explained he got his understanding of justice from two sources. One was the work of the American Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. “The other source of my understanding about what’s right and wrong in this society is from a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan,” said Carter. “After listening to his records about ‘The Ballad of Hattie Carroll’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘The Times, They Are a-Changing,’ I’ve learned to appreciate the dynamism of change in a modern society.”

It was a decision that robbed hundreds of athletes of their once-in-a-lifetime chance at Olympic glory, and for more than four decades, it weighed heavily on the man who made it — Jimmy Carter.

Carter’s passing Sunday has unearthed memories from his 1977-1981 presidency. Somewhere between his greatest foreign-policy success (the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt) and his greatest failure (the Iran hostage crisis) sits the U.S. boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

It was Carter who called for that boycott — a Cold War power play intended to express America’s disdain for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In his 1980 State of the Union Address, Carter said the invasion “could pose the most serious threat to world peace since the second World War.”

No matter how many times one crammed into the modest sanctuary at Maranatha Baptist Church, there was always some wisdom to be gleaned from the measured, Bible-inspired words of Jimmy Carter.

This was another side of the 39th president, a down-to-earth man of steadfast faith who somehow found time to teach Sunday school classes when he wasn’t building homes for the needy, or advocating for fair elections, or helping eradicate awful diseases.

For young and old, straight and gay, believers and nonbelievers, Black and white and brown, Maranatha was a far-off-the-beaten path destination in southwest Georgia where Carter, well into his 90s, stayed connected with his fellow citizens of the world.