YAZOO CITY, Miss.–No sitting president has made the kind of visit to Mississippi as did Pres. Jimmy Carter, July 22, 1977, just a few months after taking office. Carter met with the people of Yazoo City in the gym at the then-new Yazoo City High School, taking questions and talking about then-current issues on the minds of his Mississippi constituents.
“I think that no matter who’s in the White House, who’s in Congress, that the price of energy is going to go up,” said Carter, answering one woman’s question about energy bills during a time when record inflation and energy prices were on many people’s minds.
Carter was invited to Yazoo City by Owen Cooper, founder and president of Mississippi Chemical Corp., and fellow Southern Baptist. The men’s religious affiliation is how they met and became friends.
Carter caught Cooper off guard by accepting his invitation and spent the night at Cooper’s house following his town meeting at the high school.
“They had guards along that creek behind the Cooper’s house and they built a tree house out in the bakyard for the Secret Service and it stayed there for many years,” said Kent Buckley, who was a student at Yazoo City High School, and who was partly responsible for organizing some aspects of the visit and doing some of the physical work like the post-visit clean-up.
Buckley remembered the gym having no air conditioning and how hot it was the night of the town meeting.
“The school had to call in extra electricians to put in extra wiring and there was a lot of extension cord run…trying to put fans in to cool people in the gym,” he said.
While no other president had by that time stayed so long in any Mississippi locale, Carter also did something else in an unprecedented fashion, directly addressing Civil Rights during a decade in which integrated schools and public facilities were fewer than ten years old.
“In the South we were guilty for many years of the deprivation of human rights to a large portion of our citizens,” he said. “Now to look back 20 years when Black people didn’t have a right to vote, to go to a decent school, quite often did not have equal opportunity to seek or acquire a job or to get a decent home is an indictment on us and I think it was with a great deal of courage that the South was able to face up to that change. I personally believe it was the best thing to ever happen to the South in my lifetime.”
While Carter’s administration would become infamous for economic hardship and energy shortages, for a short time in July 1977, he was rather heroic to the people of central Mississippi. He paid attention and made a city feel they could be part of the national conversation.
Carter foreshadowed his humanitarian legacy in that visit, turning a sweat-drenched high school gymnasium into a temporary national think tank, where ordinary people had a say in finding solutions to the problems that would, did and do still trouble the collective American public.
