Atlanta-based New York Times reporter Richard Fausset hinted that the late President Jimmy Carter was a victim of Republican racism in “After Jimmy Carter Won the Presidency, Democrats Lost the South — Mr. Carter witnessed a shift from what had been a solidly Democratic South to one that Republicans, supported by white voters and particularly evangelicals, came to dominate.”
On the day he was sworn in as governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, an ambitious white peanut farmer from rural Sumter County, announced that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” The declaration landed like the carefully calculated bomb it was intended to be in the South of 1971 — and landed Mr. Carter on the cover of Time magazine, along with the blurb, “Dixie whistles a different tune.”
But in his ensuing half-century of public life, Mr. Carter, the one-term…
