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Mourners pay respects to Jimmy Carter as casket arrives at Presidential Center

Former US president Jimmy Carter’s flag-draped casket has arrived at the Carter Center in Atlanta, where he will lie in repose until Tuesday ahead of a state funeral for the Nobel Prize laureate later in the week.

An extended public farewell for Carter, who died December 29 at age 100, began Saturday by tracing his long arc from the Depression-era South and family farming business to the pinnacle of American political power and decades as a global humanitarian.

Carter arrives for his last visit to the Atlanta-based Carter Presidential Center from the Georgia Capitol where Carter served as a state senator and reformist governor.

Carter’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren accompanied their patriarch earlier as his hearse began its journey through his hometown of Plains, which at about 700 residents is not much bigger than when Carter was born there October 1, 1924. The procession also stopped at the farm where the future president toiled alongside the Black sharecroppers who worked for his father, before continuing to Atlanta.

“It’s amazing what you can cram into a hundred years,” says grandson Jason Carter, who now chairs the center’s governing board.

Jason Carter, former President Jimmy Carter’s grandson: “His legacy will live on not only because of the millions of people he touched across the globe,” but because of the tireless work of the Carter Center employees.

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— ABC News (@ABC) January 4, 2025

Pallbearers include members of the Secret Service that protected the Carters for almost a half-century and a military honor guard that included Navy servicemembers for the only US Naval Academy graduate to reach the Oval Office. A military band plays “Hail to the Chief” and the hymn “Be Thou My Vision” for the commander in chief who also was a devout Baptist.

Carter will lie in repose at the Carter Presidential Center, which houses his presidential library and The Carter Center, where he based his post-White House advocacy for public health, democracy and human rights, until 6 a.m. Tuesday, with the public able to pay respects around the clock.

His body will then be moved to the Capitol, where it will lie in repose until a Thursday funeral at the Washington National Cathedral, followed by a return to Plains. There, the former president will be buried next to his wife of 77 years near the home they built before his first state Senate campaign in 1962.

Scott Lyle, an engineer who grew up in Georgia but now lives in New York, was among the first mourners to pay his respects. Lyle said he joined Carter to build homes with Habitat for Humanity for the first time in LaGrange, Georgia, in 2003. Since then, he has traveled around the world to build houses with the group.

“I got to see, what some people don’t get to see, close. He was an amazing man, and he cared about others. He walked the walk,” says Scott Lyle, an engineer who volunteered with Habitat for Humanity alongside Carter and was among the first to pay his respects. “And I can’t think of anyone else that I would want to stand in line to pay my respects for.”