By Danielle Paquette, March 25, 2023<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PLAINS, Ga. \u2014 History remembers him as Jimmy Carter\u2019s closest childhood friend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In his best-selling memoirs and poetry, the former president detailed his adventures with Alonzo \u201cA.D.\u201d Davis, the nephew of Black tenant farmers who labored on Carter family land in Depression-era southwest Georgia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At a time of violently enforced racial segregation, the boys grew up together<\/a>, <\/strong>the 39th president wrote: They wrestled, hunted rabbits, caught catfish and slipped off to the movies, forging a bond that led a 14-year-old Carter to question the Jim Crow norms that barred his \u201cprimary playmate\u201d from joining his family at the dinner table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Davis, who died in 1985, is immortalized as a \u201ctimid little Black boy with kinky hair, big eyes and a tendency to mumble\u201d in \u201cAn Hour Before Daylight<\/a>,\u201d Carter\u2019s book about his rural upbringing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But according to Davis\u2019s family, that narrative omits a climactic chapter of their story. The former president never spoke publicly of what happened after his companion grew up and ran into trouble, mentioning the adult Davis only glancingly in his autobiographical work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Carter, 98, approaches the end of his life in hospice care at home<\/a>, admirers worldwide have paid tribute to the Democrat, who served from 1977 to 1981. Some people remember Carter as the peanut farmer who returned to Plains, population roughly 700, after leaving the White House. Others remember Carter as the proponent of diversity, a president who appointed more Black, Hispanic and female judges to the federal bench than all of his predecessors combined. <\/strong>Others remember Carter as the Nobel laureate who devoted his political retirement to humanitarian work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Less is known about Carter the quietly influential friend, who\u2019d stayed in touch with Davis through the decades as their paths diverged, and who had made behind-the-scenes efforts to liberate him from prison, Davis\u2019s son and niece told The Washington Post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sign up for the About US newsletter to get more stories on race and identity<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1969, two years before Carter became governor of Georgia, Davis, a jack-of-all-trades who\u2019d settled in Plains, was struggling to make ends meet, <\/strong>they said. When he confronted an employer for withholding his paycheck, the employer responded with a knife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Davis fought back, killing him, and was charged with murder, Sumter County court records show. He could have languished behind bars for years, his family said, if not for the intervention of a future president.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cJimmy got him out,\u201d his 60-year-old son, Alonza Davis, <\/strong>recalled on the stoop of the cinder-block house he inherited from his father \u2014 not far from where Carter lives now. \u201cJimmy took care of our family.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the civil rights movement, Carter, the son of a White landowner in the segregated South, stayed largely silent on race, fearing damage to his nascent political career. That changed once he secured the Georgia governorship, shifting from campaign rhetoric aimed at rural White voters, as his biographers chronicled it, to condemning racial injustice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As governor \u2014 and later as president \u2014 he railed against<\/a> a prison system that preyed on the poor, especially minorities, and pushed to free the unfairly convicted. That included his daughter\u2019s Black nanny, Mary Prince, who Carter said had been wrongfully charged with murder<\/a>. (He personally served as Prince\u2019s parole officer in the White House, and she remains his caretaker today.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In his speeches and memoirs, Carter credited his boyhood friends and caretakers as formative influences on his thinking about race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll of my playmates, all of my companions in the field \u2014 the ones I hunted with, fished with, wrestled with, fought with \u2014 were Black people,\u201d he said in one 2014 speech. \u201cMy life was really shaped \u2014 perhaps as much as any other White American who ever lived \u2014 by a Black culture.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Davis, who also went by Alvin, was a main character in the stories Carter told \u2014 shy around White adults, the former president noted in his 2001 memoir, but \u201ccarefree and exuberant\u201d when the boys played together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI was perfectly at ease in his house, and minded his aunt and uncle as if they were my own parents,\u201d Carter wrote in \u201cAn Hour Before Daylight.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAt least during our younger years, I believe he felt equally comfortable in our house; he and I didn\u2019t think it was anything out of the ordinary in our eating together in the kitchen, rather than at the table where my family assembled for meals.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carter hadn\u2019t reflected much on the racial divide that governed his society, \u201cwhich we accepted like breathing,\u201d he wrote, until one day when he was about 14 and Davis was about 12. They\u2019d been roaming the fields with another friend when the Black boys stopped at a pasture gate, waiting for the White boy to enter first. Carter wondered if they were pranking him. Then he realized his friends were observing Jim Crow etiquette.<\/p>\n\n\n\n