Jimmy Carter funeral updates: Former president’s procession begins in his native Georgia

President Jimmy Carter’s multi-day funeral schedule begins this morning, at 10:15 a.m. Eastern Time.

Former and current Secret Service agents assigned to Carter’s detail will carry his remains to a hearse this morning in Americus, Georgia.

From there, the motorcade will travel to his childhood home in Plains before heading toward Atlanta.

In the state’s capital, the former president will be taken to the Carter Presidential Center, where he will lie in repose until early Tuesday.

“The contrast between the peanut farmer and the mogul could not be more different as the US marks the passing of its most humble president – and braces for the return of its most divisive”

Carter was full of ambition at the start of his presidency but beset with problems from the start.

The presidency was weighed down by multiple crises. In the 1970s, the economy struggled with a rare combination of simultaneous inflation and recession, an oil shortage sent gas prices soaring and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, derailing negotiations for an important arms treaty.

Notably, in a struggle that lasted almost as long as his presidency, Carter fought over an energy program that was structured to make fuel expensive enough that consumers would be encouraged to conserve it.

The crisis required Carter to address the nation multiple times in 1979.

“In order to control energy price, production, and distribution, the Federal bureaucracy and red tape have become so complicated, it is almost unbelievable. Energy prices are high, and they’re going higher, no matter what we do,” he said in an April 1979 speech.

Noble Prize-winning peacemaker Jimmy Carter spent nearly four decades waging war to eliminate an ancient parasite plaguing the world’s poorest people.

Rarely fatal but searingly painful and debilitating, Guinea worm disease infects people who drink water tainted with larvae that grow inside the body into worms as much as 3-feet-long. The noodle-thin parasites then burrow their way out, breaking through the skin in burning blisters.

Carter made eradicating Guinea worm a top mission of The Carter Center, the nonprofit he and his wife, Rosalynn Carter, founded after leaving the White House. The former president rallied public health experts, billionaire donors, African heads of state and thousands of volunteer villagers to work toward eliminating a human disease for only the second time in history.

“The Carter administration did, however, notch up one diplomatic success, which might have gained more recognition without what happened next. The success came with the Camp David accords that were signed in September 1978; that is a third of the way through his term, and constituted a diplomatic breakthrough of the first order.”

Mary Dejevsky writes:

He was the oldest living president and had been out of the White House for more than 35 years, but Jimmy Carter never stopped working to improve the lives of others — much of which included building homes.

Even well into his 90s, Carter put on a hard hat and volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, the nonprofit organization he often partnered with through The Carter Center.

The one-term president — who died Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia — worked alongside 103,000 volunteers in 14 countries to build, renovate and repair 4,331 homes with Habitat for Humanity for more than 35 years. Often, Carter and his late wife, former first lady Rosalynn Carter, volunteered together.

The couple first participated in a Habitat for Humanity project in 1984 in New York City. Carter discovered the organization while on a run. He recalled that he passed by a building and thought, “Rosalynn and I should come up and give them a hand.”

“When we left the White House, we could have done anything,” Carter once said. “But our choice was to volunteer as Habitat workers, and that’s been a life-changing experience for us.”

Carter specifically requested that his body not be transported by train from Washington D.C. to Georgia, once telling a staffer, “if you take my cold, dead body across the U.S. by train, I’ll haunt you until the day you die.”

In the past, some presidents have traveled from Washington D.C. to their place of rest by train, allowing people all across the U.S. to pay their respects. George H.W. Bush’s family did this in 2018.

But Cater was adamant this not be his situation, according to the New York Times. Instead, his body will be transported by military flight.

Carter will be remembered for his commitment to humanitarian services and kindness toward people. Delta Airlines shared their fond memories of the former president with a video showing Carter shaking hands with each passenger on board.

“Every time Jimmy Carter flew Delta, he shook hands with each person on the plane. Because that’s who he was. Someone who treated people as people,” Delta wrote