Jimmy Carter’s Funeral: Former President to be Remembered in Washington Service before being Laid to Rest in Georgia Hometown

Jimmy Carter, the 39th U.S. president, will be remembered with a funeral at Washington National Cathedral before being laid to rest in his small Georgia hometown. Carter, who saw himself as an outsider during his presidency, will be honored with a second service attended by President Joe Biden, who was the first sitting senator to endorse Carter’s campaign in 1976.

Joe Biden, set to eulogize Carter, will be joined by all of Carter’s living successors, including President-elect Donald Trump. The participation of all living U.S. presidents is a rare event that highlights the respect Carter garnered throughout his life. Trump paid his respects to Carter a day before the funeral.

Thursday’s ceremonies will bring together political leaders, prominent figures, and ordinary citizens to celebrate Carter’s legacy of decency and hard work. Carter was praised for his dedication to public service and his ability to transcend mere political ambition.

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“He set a very high bar for presidents, how you can use voice and leadership for causes,” said Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder whose foundation funded Carter’s work to eliminate treatable diseases like the Guinea worm. Gates spoke to The Associated Press on Wednesday shortly before flying to Washington for the funeral.

“Whatever prestige and resources you are lucky enough to have, ideally you can take those and take a even broader societal view in your post private sector career,” Gates said.

Bernice King, daughter of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., compared the two Georgians and Nobel Peace Prize winners.

“Both President Jimmy Carter and my father showed us what is possible when your faith compels you to live and lead from a love-centered place,” said King, who is also planning to attend the Washington service.

Ted Mondale, son of Walter Mondale, Carter’s vice president, is expected to read a eulogy his father wrote for Carter before his own death in 2021.

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Thursday will conclude six days of national rites that began in Plains, Georgia, where Carter was born in 1924, lived most of his life and died Dec. 29 at the age of 100. Ceremonies continued in Atlanta and Washington, where Carter, a former Naval officer, engineer and peanut farmer, has lain in state since Tuesday.

Long lines of mourners waited several hours in frigid temperatures to file past his flag-draped casket in the Capitol Rotunda, as tributes focused as much on Carter’s humanitarian work after leaving the White House as what he did as president from 1977 to 1981.

After the morning service in Washington, Carter’s remains, his four children and extended family will return to Georgia on a Boeing 747 that serves as Air Force One when the sitting president is aboard.

The outspoken Baptist evangelical, who campaigned as a born-again Christian, will then be remembered in an afternoon funeral at Maranatha Baptist Church, the small edifice where he taught Sunday School for decades after leaving the White House and where his casket will sit beneath a wooden cross he fashioned in his own woodshop.

Following a final ride through his hometown, past the old train depot that served as his 1976 presidential campaign headquarters, he will be buried on family land in a plot next to former first lady Rosalynn Carter, who died in 2023 after more than 77 years of marriage.

Carter, who won the presidency promising good government and honest talk for an electorate disillusioned by the Vietnam War and Watergate, signed significant legislation and negotiated a landmark peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. But he also presided over inflation, rising interest rates and international crises and lost a landslide to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Two years later he and Rosalynn established The Carter Center in Atlanta as a nongovernmental organization that took them across the world fighting disease, mediating conflict, monitoring elections and advocating for racial and gender equity. The center, where Carter lay in repose before coming to Washington, currently has 3,000 employees and contractors globally.

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Associated Press writers Michael Liedtke in Indian Wells, California, and Kate Brumback in Atlanta contributed to this report.