55 pages • 1 hour read
Jimmy CarterAn Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Role of Family in Shaping Personal Identity
An Hour Before Daylight largely focuses on Carter’s early years in Plains, Georgia, living and working on his family’s farm. In recounting his parents’ personalities and influence on him, Carter examines the role of family in shaping personal identity.
Carter’s portrait of his father, Earl, is his most complex. On the one hand, he was fair to his workers, treating his Black tenants and laborers with more respect than many white farmers did. He also showed compassion to his son, such as when he personally went to Carter’s school to tell him his dog had died. On the other hand, Carter admits to having “strongly mixed feelings” (257) about his father, saying he used to hunger for one of his rare demonstrations of affection. Earl was also an unabashed racist. While his wife showed open kindness and affection toward their Black neighbors, Earl Carter at most could find compromises that allowed him to maintain segregation and white domination. The scene in which he lets his Black neighbors listen to the Joe Louis fight, but only as long as they stay in the yard, is an example of his refusal to see his Black neighbors as his equals.
Carter describes his father as a product of his time, and his own behavior and career trajectory suggest that Earl influenced Carter in many ways. His childhood work ethic was considerable, and the young Carter was eager to please his father by helping out around the farm. He also mirrors something of his father’s shrewd business sense, as he made enough money to buy and rent out five of his father’s tenant houses at about age 11. The greatest mark of Earl’s influence is found in Carter’s decision to follow in his footsteps as a farmer, with Carter giving up his naval career after he realized he felt his father’s lifestyle had more value.
Carter’s mother Lillian is presented as helping form Carter’s sense of compassion and morality. Carter is proud of his mother’s nursing career and details her acts of compassion for others. Lillian offered free medical care to her Black neighbors and tried to combat their malnutrition by helping to improve their diets. She also showed compassion to itinerant laborers and unemployed persons who would stop by the family home to ask for water and food. Carter’s portrait implies that Lillian’s respect for her Black neighbors and acts of charity toward people in need influenced Carter’s own commitment to racial justice and human rights as an adult and in his political career.
In detailing his parents’ roles in his life and reflecting on his heritage, Carter suggests in his memoir that he has inherited traits from both sides of his family. In offering these reflections, Carter depicts his personal identity as having been indelibly shaped by the family ties present from his earliest years.
The Devastating Impact of Racial Segregation
Carter establishes the pervasiveness of segregation in the early 20th-century American South in Chapter 1, when he refers to the “separate but equal” doctrine established by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson. The 1896 ruling stated that “separate but equal” treatment for Black and white citizens was not a form of discrimination. As Carter says, the races might have been “inseparable” in their daily lives, yet they were kept apart by this law, along with social custom and misinterpretation of the Bible. The result was devastating to Black citizens.
Carter clearly lays out the injustices perpetrated on Black Southerners in the name of segregation. They couldn’t vote, serve on juries, or take part in political affairs. Children attended their own, crowded schools with inadequate supplies. They sat in separate parts of trains and public spaces. Black tenant farmers, who made up 80% of the tenants in Carter’s area, were at the mercy of the harsh or unfair landlords who kept financial records. With an insufficient diet and heavy work, the life expectancy of Black men and women in his youth was less than 50 years. Carter also mentions how some local white men supported the Ku Klux Klan, and he heard about lynchings, which speaks to the threat of violence Black citizens lived with daily.
Carter presents his youthful colorblindness as a sort of Eden that he would inevitably have to leave behind. He was so close to his Black friend A.D. that his friend’s guardians assigned him Carter’s own birthday so they could share in their celebrations. Carter also depicts his relationships with his Black neighbors as close, praising the Clarks for welcoming him into their home and teaching him important moral values. Nevertheless, Carter observed the norms of segregation, such as when he went to the movies with A.D. and they sat in separate parts of the train and theater. He believed that they were united in friendship despite the discrimination A.D. faced, but did not question that discrimination.
This closeness began to change around the time Carter was 14, when his Black friends began to defer to him. At the time, he attributed his own unquestioned acceptance of this deference to a move toward adulthood “in an unquestioned segregated society” (229). However, his failure to ever challenge the system continues to trouble him as he looks back over six decades later. In highlighting how pervasive and normalized the system of segregation and discrimination against Black Americans was, Carter depicts the South as a place marred by systemic injustice and racial inequality.
The Gap Between Washington and Plains
Carter grew up during tumultuous times, witnessing the Jim Crow South, sharecropping, the Depression, and the New Deal. As he shows how Southerners alternately resented or benefited from government policies, he reveals the distance between policy makers’ intentions and the impact the policies have on ordinary people, for better or worse.
The benefits of rural electrification, which came in 1938, were unquestionable to the Carters and their neighbors. However, just as Southerners framed the Civil War in terms of “the intrusion of the federal government in the private lives of citizens” (17-18), they were resistant to many of the policies of Roosevelt’s New Deal, either because they didn’t derive personal benefits from them or because they went against deeply ingrained local beliefs.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act of May 1933 mandated the destruction of a “substantial” part of the cotton crop, creating “vehement and sustained opposition” (63). Carter recalls a mule confused by the order to step on precious plants, emphasizing how counterintuitive such policies were and how needlessly and unintentionally wasteful they could be. In a similar vein, the order to slaughter hundreds of thousands of perfectly good hogs was, to Carter’s father, “sacrilegious” and a “totally unacceptable invasion by the federal government into the private affairs of free Americans” (64).
Nor, as Carter points out, could the government’s efforts completely rectify a fundamentally broken system, in which too many farmers worked on small farms and the tenancy system remained in place. He also acknowledges that government programs were also ripe for theft and corruption at the local level, as unscrupulous landlords could force a tenant family off a farm, then pocket their government payment. Relief programs were themselves racist, providing less money to Black families on the assumption they could live more cheaply.
Carter also makes the point that when it came to segregation, the government was far too tardy in erasing the effects of Plessy v. Ferguson and its sham “separate but equal” ruling. His own mother, who was extremely broad-minded by the standards of her time, defended his father’s racism by saying that he died in 1953, when there “was no such thing as integration” (269). Not until 1954 would Brown v. Board of Education rule that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional. The Voting Rights Act that outlawed discriminatory voting practices in the South came more than a decade later, in 1965. As the author says in Chapter 11, times did change in Georgia, but slowly.
In detailing both the successes and failures of government policies at a local level, Carter depicts the gap that sometimes exists between Washington and rural areas like Plains. His firsthand experiences of such policies imply that, as a governor and then as a president, he kept these formative experiences in mind.
