As he nears his 96th birthday, Jimmy Carter is revered by many as a moral exemplar—the rare political figure who, whatever his shortcomings, lives his values. But that wasn’t always so.
In the 1960s, as a state senator from southwest Georgia, Mr. Carter ducked the civil-rights movement and did nothing to confront police violence in his own backyard. When the county sheriff—whom Martin Luther King, Jr. described as “the meanest man in the world”—used cattle prods on teenage Black protesters, Mr. Carter stayed silent. Not until he became governor of Georgia in 1971 did he start to publicly embrace racial justice.
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