Jimmy Carter’s flag-draped casket is on its way to Atlanta as the 39th president’s state funeral begins.

PLAINS, Ga. — Jimmy Carter’s long public farewell began Saturday in Georgia, with the flag-draped casket of the 39th U.S. president rolling through his small hometown and past his childhood farm en route to Atlanta, where he rose through the political ranks and founded his decades. humanitarian work after leaving the White House.

The former president’s six-day state funeral began in Americus at the Phoebe Sumter Medical Center, where current and former Secret Service agents who protected the late president loaded his remains into a black hearse and l ‘accompanied him as he left campus towards Plains. As Carter’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren accompanied their patriarch, a sad train whistle filled the clear air as the pallbearers faced the hearse, hands over hearts, for a final goodbye .

In Plains, where Carter was born Oct. 1, 1924, and lived most of his life, mourners lined Main Street, some holding bouquets of flowers and wearing pins bearing the former president’s likeness. He died on December 29 at the age of 100.

“We want to honor him,” said Will Porter Shelbrock, 12, born more than three decades after Carter left the White House in 1981. “He was ahead of his time in what he tried to do it and tried to do it. to accomplish. »

It was Porter Shelbrock’s idea to make the trip to the Plains from Gainesville, Florida, with his grandmother, 66-year-old Susan Cone. He admires Carter for his humanitarian work building homes and promoting peace, and talking about global warming before the climate crisis was a part of it. of current political discourse.

Willie Browner, 75, described Carter as coming from a bygone era of American politics.

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PHOTOS: Jimmy Carter’s flag-draped casket on its way to Atlanta as state funeral for 39th president begins

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“This man didn’t just think about himself,” said Browner, who grew up in the town of Parrott, about 15 miles from Plains, before moving to Miami.

Browner said it means “a lot” that a president comes from a small Southern town like his – something he said is unlikely to happen again.

Indeed, Saturday’s procession was intended to reflect Carter’s deep rural roots and remarkable rise to the world stage as a political leader, global advocate for democracy and human rights, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate .

Over the course of a few blocks in the Plains, the procession passed near where Carter and his late wife Rosalynn, who died in November 2023, ran the family peanut warehouse and the small house where his mother, a nurse, had given birth first. lady in 1927. The hearse passed the old railroad station that served as Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign – a grassroots effort that depended on public funding, dwarfed by the billion-dollar U.S. presidential budget. 21st century campaigns.

As it left downtown, the motorcade passed the house where Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter both died. It is the same one-story home the couple built before their first Senate campaign in 1962, their life there interrupted only by four years in the Georgia governor’s mansion and four at the White House.

Afterwards, the former president was honored by the National Park Service in front of his family farm, now part of the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park. A few dozen rangers stood in formation outside the home, which had no running water or electricity when Carter was a child, as the old farm bell tolled 39 times to honor Carter’s place as the 39th president.

Next to the house remains the tennis court that Carter’s father, James Earl Carter Sr., built for the family — a nod to the mix of privilege and tough rural life that defined the upbringing of the future president. Carter worked on his father’s farm throughout the Great Depression, but it was land that belonged to the elder Carter, with the family surrounded by black farmers during the era of Jim Crow segregation.

Carter wrote and spoke extensively about these formative years and how the abject poverty and institutional racism he saw influenced his future policies in government and his human rights work once that he left the White House.

The procession headed to Atlanta Saturday afternoon for a moment of silence in front of the Georgia Capitol and a ceremony at the Carter Presidential Center.

There, Carter will lie in state until Tuesday morning, when he will be transported to Washington for state display at the U.S. Capitol. His state funeral will be held at 10 a.m. Thursday at the Washington National Cathedral, followed by a return to Plains for an invitation-only funeral at Maranatha Baptist Church.

He will be buried near his home, next to Rosalynn Carter.