Agnes Scott Mourns Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter

Today we mourn the passing of Rosalynn Carter, activist, former First Lady, wife of President Jimmy Carter, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, who died on Sunday, November 19. Our thoughts are with the Carter family. On August 18, 1927, Eleanor Rosalynn Smith was born in Plains, Georgia. Her delivery nurse, Lillian Carter, was President Jimmy Carter’s mother. She introduced the two shortly after Rosalynn’s birth. This meeting began a lifetime spent together—from Plains to the White House and back to Plains where President Carter resides at 99 years old. They had been married for 77 years.

Mrs. Carter spent a lot of time at Agnes Scott over the years. “I told President Schmidt this morning that The Carter Center was close enough for me to jog over,” she remarked at Convocation in 1988 when she became a Distinguished Centennial Lecturer. She lectured on human rights, ethics, mental health, conflict resolution and more.

In the 1989 Alumnae Magazine, she wrote, “I think about how far American women have come since the time when my friends and I, in Plains, spent our free time dreaming of catching the right man and making marriage our career so we would never be old maids. Enormous changes have taken place.”

We are grateful for Mrs. Carter’s life, the time she spent with our students and her work in pushing forward what women around the world can become. Her tireless work through The Carter Center and the Rosalynn Carter Center for Caregiving and her involvement with Habitat for Humanity and other national organizations transformed the lives of countless people around the world.

With grateful hearts,

Agnes Scott College