PLAINS, Ga. (AP) — Rosalynn Carter will receive her final farewells Wednesday in the same tiny town where she was born and that served as a home base as she and her husband, former President Jimmy Carter, climbed to the White House and spent four decades thereafter as global humanitarians.
The former first lady, who died Nov. 19 at the age of 96, will have her hometown funeral at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, where she and her husband spent decades welcoming guests when they were not traveling. The service comes on the last of three days of public tributes that began Monday in nearby Americus and continued in Atlanta.
Rosalynn Carter will be buried in a plot she will one day share with her husband, the 99-year-old former president who first met his wife of 77 years when she was a newborn, a few days after his mother delivered her.
“She was born just a few years after women got the right to vote in this small town in the South where people were still plowing their fields behind mules,” grandson Jason Carter said Tuesday during a memorial service at Atlanta’s Glenn Memorial Church.
Coming from that town of about 600 — then and now — Rosalynn Carter became a global figure whose “effort changed lives,” her grandson said. She was Jimmy Carter’s closest political adviser and a political force in her own right, and she advocated for better mental health care in America and brought attention to underappreciated caregivers in millions of U.S. households. She traveled as first lady and afterward to developing nations, where she fought disease, famine and abuse of women and girls.
Even so, Jason Carter said his grandmother never stopped being the small-town Southerner whose cooking repertoire leaned heavily on mayonnaise and pimento cheese.
The Atlanta portion of the tribute schedule this week has reflected the grandest chapters of Rosalynn Carter’s life — lying in repose steps away from The Carter Center that she and her husband co-founded after leaving the White House, then a funeral filled with the music of a symphony chorus and majestic pipe organ as President Joe Biden, former President Bill Clinton and every living U.S. first lady sat in the front row with Jimmy Carter and the couple’s four children.
The proceedings Wednesday will underscore the simpler constants in Rosalynn Carter’s life. The sanctuary in Plains seats fewer people than the balcony at Glenn Memorial in Atlanta. Maranatha, tucked away at the edge of Plains where the town gives way to cotton fields, has no powerful organ. But there is a wooden cross that Jimmy Carter fashioned in his workshop, along with offering plates he turned on his lathe.
Church members, who are included in the invitation-only ceremony, rarely talk of ”President Carter” or “Mrs. Carter.” They are supporting “Mr. Jimmy” as he grieves for “Ms. Rosalynn.” Two of the Carters’ sons, Jeff and Jack, will speak about their mother. James Earl “Chip” Carter III and Amy Carter spoke during the Atlanta service.
Pastor Tony Lowden, the Carters’ longtime friend and personal minister, will officiate and offer a eulogy. He also officiated Tuesday, emphasizing that Rosalynn Carter’s work, from the Georgia statehouse when Jimmy Carter was governor to the 120-plus countries that she visited, was an extension of her faith.
“Oh, how she loved J.C. — Jimmy Carter. I also have to tell you that she loved J.C. — Jesus Christ,” Lowden said, recalling how Rosalynn Carter read the Bible in English and Spanish and took seriously the New Testament teaching that “faith without works is dead.”
“When she read the word of God, it went to her head, and then it went to her heart” and then into action, Lowden said. ”From her head to her heart to her hands, and she made it a habit. If you love our first lady who was global, make it a habit. Take your passion and make it a habit. Link your passion up with compassion. Then there will be peace. Then there will be love.” When the motorcade leaves Maranatha, it will carry Rosalynn Carter for the last time through the town where she lived for more than 80 of her 96 years.
The same weekend that she died, townspeople put up holiday lights and decorations, as they do every year. The addition this season is a photo collage of in front of the downtown tree featuring the “First Lady of Plains.”
Barricades are set up along the route for the public to pay their respects.
Her casket will pass the old high school where she was valedictorian during World War II and Plains Baptist Church where she and the former president were once outliers arguing for racial integration. The motorcade with then pass through the commercial district where she became Jimmy’s indispensable partner in their peanut business, and past the old train depot where she helped run the winning 1976 presidential campaign.
The hearse will pass Plains Methodist Church where she married young Navy Lt. Jimmy Carter in 1946. And it will return, finally, to what locals call “the Carter compound,” property that includes the former first couple’s one-story ranch house, the pond where she fished, the security outposts for the Secret Service agents who protected her for 47 years.
She will be buried in view of the front porch of the home where the 39th American president still lives.
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This story has been updated to correct pastor’s surname to Lowden, not Snowden.