It is remarkable that Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King Jr.—two sons of Georgia born within five years of each other, both Nobel Prize laureates whose Christian faith inspired lives of moral leadership—never met.

When King was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968, Carter was a former state legislator and failed gubernatorial candidate from a Ku Klux Klan–riddled South Georgia county. In less than a decade, Carter would occupy the White House. Every president’s path to the role is improbable, but Carter’s was particularly so: One of his speechwriters, Hendrik Hertzberg, would recall that Carter’s election was as close “as the American people have ever come to picking someone out of the phone book to be president.”

It could never have happened without the political and social revolution that King and his fellow Black Southerners waged. Carter’s story is a reminder of how the civil rights movement transformed the lives of Black and white Southerners alike.

Like all ambitious white politicians of his generation, Carter had to cope with the forces of fierce political reaction that emerged in the civil rights era. No political survivor emerged from that era unscathed, not even Carter.

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Yet Carter was nimble enough to capitalize on the moral and democratic promise that the civil rights movement inspired. Intertwined as it was with their faith, the sense of moral purpose that Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders brought to American political life would guide Carter’s actions both during his presidency and in the decades of service that followed.

Carter was building a career in the Navy when, in 1953, his father died of cancer. A dutiful son, he returned to his small, rural hometown in South Georgia to take over the family’s cash-strapped farm. He arrived six months before the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which unleashed a wave of reactionary politics throughout the South.

As a graduate of Annapolis, and with the broadening experience of a naval career, Carter was certainly among the more open-minded white Southerners of his generation. But he was also an ambitious and well-established member of what King, in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” called “the oppressor race.” Carter largely kept his head down during the events that unfolded in the decade following the Brown decision. He refused to join the Citizens’ Councils—the “white-collar Klan” of its day—yet as a member of his local school board, his record was checkered; sometimes he voted to divert extra resources to his district’s white school.

It was another Supreme Court decision—the “one person, one vote” ruling Baker v. Carr in 1961—that inspired Carter to seek political office. The ruling ended the structural advantages that the rural “courthouse gangs” in Georgia politics had enjoyed for decades. Carter still had to overcome blatant voter fraud by a political boss in a nearby county to win election to the Georgia State Senate.

As a senator, Carter distinguished himself with his forward-looking record. Never lacking ambition, he announced his candidacy for a seat in the House of Representatives in 1966, but quickly switched to the governor’s race, realizing he would prefer the executive authority the governorship would provide. It was a fortuitous decision: If Carter had won election to the House and built his political career there, he likely would never have become president. In the House, he would have had to establish a segregationist voting record to please voters back home, which would have been a liability nationwide by the 1970s. His ability to run as a Washington outsider in 1976, when Watergate was a vivid and recent memory, was key to his presidential campaign.

In the 1966 Democratic gubernatorial primary, Carter faced Lester Maddox, one of the notorious demagogues of that era. Maddox had risen to fame in Georgia by using a pick-axe handle to threaten civil rights protesters who came to sit in at his fried chicken restaurant. Carter, who found himself in the middle in that race, finished third in the Democratic primary. He was too liberal for his fellow rural white Georgians, who favored the hardline segregationist Maddox, but too conservative for supporters of Ellis Arnall, a former Georgia governor who had earlier ended the poll tax and amassed a progressive record on racial issues. Maddox went on to win the primary and the general election, becoming a symbol of the racist reaction that flared up following the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts.

Carter would have to negotiate those storms if he were ever to win high office. In 1969, the Supreme Court’s decision in Holmes v. Alexander brought an immediate end to segregation in many of the most recalcitrant school districts across the Deep South. White flight “segregation academies” sprung up literally overnight in some areas. It looked like 1970 would be another favorable election cycle for reactionary segregationists. It was for George Wallace, who won the Alabama governorship that year in a bitterly racist campaign against a former protégé. At the same time, Nixon’s White House backed a number of archconservative candidates across the South, hoping to break the Democratic hold on the region.

Nixon’s plan backfired, exposing the limits of a race-based “Southern strategy” in many parts of the South. Moderate candidates beat hard-line racists in Virginia, Arkansas, and, most notably, South Carolina, where the Republican candidate, aligned closely with Senator Strom Thurmond and the Nixon White House, had made opposition to court-ordered segregation the centerpiece of his campaign. The lesson seemed to be that the majority of Southern whites were ready to turn the page on what one Democrat called the politics of the three Ps: “passion and prejudice and polarization.”

In 1970, Carter played both sides of the fence: He won a hard-fought Democratic gubernatorial primary race against former moderate Georgia governor Carl Sanders. He ran as a populist friend of the working man (in comparison to Sanders, who after leaving the governorship had become a wealthy corporate lawyer). At the same time, he sought and won the endorsement of Wallace. During the campaign, however, Carter avoided racial issues. An auxiliary organization backing Carter circulated in rural counties a picture of Sanders, part-owner of the Atlanta Hawks, attending a locker-room celebration in which a Black player was dousing Sanders with champagne. Black voters were clear which candidate they preferred: Sanders won 90 percent of the Black vote in the primary, but lost to Carter by 80,000 votes.

Carter mended political fences in the general election campaign, spending countless hours in Black churches, where the talk of sin and redemption, faith and hope, registered in ways that went beyond politics. His 1970 primary campaign would be the dirty little secret that detractors would point to for the rest of his life. The best evidence of Carter’s change of heart was his record once he gained office.

Carter’s 1971 inaugural speech came as a shock to most people, Black and white alike: “I say to you quite frankly, the time for discrimination is over,” Carter declared. “No poor, rural, weak or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job or simple justice.” Time magazine put Carter on its cover with the headline “Dixie Whistles a Different Tune.” It was his first brush with national political fame, making him the embodiment of a new generation of white Southerners who would be formidable figures in national Democratic Party politics.

As governor, Carter appointed numerous Black Georgians to positions in state government and welcomed civil rights leaders to the governor’s office. In contrast to his predecessor, Lester Maddox, who had refused to close the state government during Martin Luther King’s funeral, Carter made headlines by hanging a portrait of King, along with two other Black leaders, in the state capitol. He was an outspoken advocate of criminal justice reform, noting how Georgia laws discriminated against poor people.

When Carter ran for president in 1976, high-profile Black leaders in Georgia—many of them heroes from the civil rights struggle—supported him. Martin Luther King Sr., Coretta Scott King, and Andrew Young all went before national audiences of Black leaders to vouch for this little known, one-term governor with a Southern drawl. On the campaign trail, Carter spoke of King’s legacy at a hospital in Los Angeles named for the slain leader. King was a “doctor to a sick society,” Carter said, “a prophet of a new and better America.” He foresaw “an America in which Martin Luther King’s dream is our national dream.”

As president, Carter placed human rights at the center of his foreign policy, drawing explicitly on the example of King and the civil rights leaders who had forced civil rights onto the agenda of American domestic politics. He appointed Andrew Young, one of King’s closest lieutenants, as ambassador to the United Nations. He also appointed Patricia Derian, a Jackson housewife who had helped to desegregate the Mississippi Democratic Party, to run a newly created office of human rights in the State Department.

In 1976, the election of a white Southerner as president just years after the violent struggle for civil rights—someone who, despite moments of weakness, had reckoned with the racism of his home and family and vowed to follow a different course—gave hope to millions of Americans. Despite all that had come before, the country, as Carter himself put it, might yet live up “to the majesty of its Constitution and the simple decency of its people.”

If Jimmy Carter believed in anything, it was in the simple decency of the American people. That will stand as his legacy always.