The Portal to Texas History
Jimmy Carter spoke at Cowtown Coliseum in 1979.
Former President Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday, made several notable trips to Fort Worth in the roles of candidate, commander-in-chief, retired statesman, and humanitarian.
His trip to Fort Worth as part of his successful campaign to unseat incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976 began with a visit to church.
The entire Carter family, including wife Rosalyn, their three sons and wives, and daughter Amy, made a stop for Sunday services at University Baptist Church, just two days before the election.
“He is a Southern Baptist,” said Rev. James Harris, pastor, in welcoming a presidential candidate. “He is in our city.”
Rev. Harris, however, would not be handing out any endorsements, one way or the other, unlike his counterpart, Rev. W.A. Criswell, of First Baptist Church in Dallas. Criswell had immersed Ford in the waters of his ratification, giving his blessing in Ford’s bid to remain president for his own term after succeeding the disgraced Richard Nixon, who resigned in 1974.
“I do not believe in mixing politics and religion,” Harris said, according to reports at the time in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Also, “the word came to me that he did not expect and endorsement and did not want one.”
Harris’ sermon that day focused on the plight of the poor, a topic deeply resonant with Carter’s conscience. Twice, Carter came back to Fort Worth over the decades with messages on obligations to the needy.
In 1992, at the inauguration of Texas Wesleyan President Jake Schrum, Carter made calls on Fort Worth to lend hands of support for the least of us, particularly those living in poverty. “I would like to see Texas Wesleyan University as the focal point for these goals,” he said.
In 2014, Carter returned to help build homes with Habitat for Humanity, an organization he had supported for decades.
After church that day in 1976, Carter emphasized in a speech at the Fort Worth Convention Center — then called the Tarrant County Convention Center — that the best way to address poverty was through the dignity of a job.
“I believe in hard work. I believe we can have a working nation and not a welfare nation.”
A crowd estimated by Tarrant County Democratic officials to be 10,000 to 12,000 was there to see him. Among them were U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, U.S. Rep. Jim Wright, Bob Strauss, Gov. Dolph Briscoe, future Gov. Mark White, state party Chairman Calvin Guest of Bryan, state party Vice Chairwoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, a future member of the U.S. House, and U.S. Rep. Dale Milford, who was eventually succeeded by Martin Frost in Texas’ 24th District.
“Tuesday night there’s going to be a lot of shocked and surprised and disappointed Republicans around,” Carter accurately predicted. Carter is the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry Texas.
Two years later, Carter was back, in the same convention center.
Wright, by then House Majority Leader, praised the president as a man of great humility, having “consciously deregalized the imperial trappings of his office. He is a people’s man, content to be quite simply himself — no more and no less.”
Carter, Wright said, was the least pretentious of the eight presidents he had served with.
“He has walked straight up to questions as fraught with divisive potential as the B-1 bomber, the Panama Canal, reform of Civil Service and of the welfare systems, popular spending programs, the nationwide coal strike, and most important of all, the energy crisis.”
Never once, Wright continued, has Carter “looked for the easy way out, nor asked what powerful group he might have to oppose.”
That is politically courageous, the future House speaker said. The president, who made campaign stops here in 1979 and 1980, had proven that “that gentility does not equate with weakness.”
