In 1970, my wife, Carolyn, and I moved to Koinonia Farm in South Georgia, USA. This Christian community founded in 1942 by Clarence and Florence Jordan and Martin and Mabel England was determined to befriend people of all ethnicities in spite of the United States’ racial segregation and numerous attacks on the community by the KKK (more than two dozen bullet holes could be seen in the buildings on the premises, though fortunately no one had been killed). In the midst of adjusting to this exciting but demanding life of faith, we heard that a peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter from Plains, a little town eight miles up the road, had just become governor of Georgia.

A former neighbor of Jimmy Carter remembers what motivated him.