A Rural Georgia Town Formed a U.S. President
Jimmy Carter’s memoir ‘An Hour Before Daylight’
An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood is Jimmy Carter’s 2001 memoir of growing up on a farm. The book doesn’t discuss any of the public offices he held, including the presidency. It’s only about his relationship to family, friends, farms, and nature, with consideration of his perception of race relations and the slow technological modernization of the area.
The prose is beautiful, and the book will help you understand this former U.S. president better.
Before He Was Born
In 1864, Jimmy Carter’s great-great-grandfather died, designating his children as the enslavers of 43 people. After the Civil War, there was Reconstruction, in which former Confederate states were put under military rule in an attempt to push them to grant equal rights to Black people. In 1876, Carter’s grandfather, then a young teen, witnessed “what he saw as the Northern oppressors” pull out of Georgia. The tragic failure of Reconstruction, Carter wrote, was the “failure to establish justice for the former slaves.” By 1910, a quarter of Southern farm owners were Black, but on average their farms were smaller than white people’s. Farm ownership did not mean wealth or equality.
