Jimmy Carter's push for social justice his lasting Long Island legacy

President Jimmy Carter was best known for brokering peace between Egypt and Israel and later inspiring millions around the world with his humanitarian work, but the former Georgia governor and peanut farmer also left an indelible mark on Long Island. 

And, as it turns out, Long Island did the same for the 39th president: Huntington's Harry Chapin, the singer-songwriter and social activist who helped elevate the fight against hunger into a global cause, personally lobbied Carter on hunger issues and was a driving force behind the creation of the Presidential Commission on World Hunger. Formed in 1979, the 20-member panel, including Chapin, was started to gather data on hunger and malnutrition.

"Jimmy Carter was the first president to take a serious look at this issue of hunger in America," Paule Pachter, CEO of Long Island Cares — The Harry Chapin Regional Food Bank, previously told Newsday. "Jimmy Carter was inspired by Harry's passion for social justice."

Carter, 100, died Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia, the Carter Center in Atlanta said.

The commission's recommendations were never implemented by the Reagan administration, but Pachter said it laid the groundwork for policy decisions on future hunger and nutrition programs and helped shape the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. At the September 2022 conference, President Joe Biden set a goal to end hunger and increase healthy eating and physical activity by 2030 so fewer Americans experience diet-related diseases.

Chapin, who founded the regional food bank in 1980, was killed in a crash on the Long Island Expressway in 1981. His brother Tom Chapin told Newsday the commission "clarified" the issue of hunger as one of policy and not of worldwide food availability and established the idea of "food justice."

"I think the hunger commission articulated that," Chapin said last year. 

Hofstra panel assesses Carter's legacy

Carter was a one-term president ridiculed by critics as ineffective, but speakers at a 1990 conference at Hofstra University said he was ahead of his time in many ways. 

In 1990, Hofstra hosted a three-day conference on Carter’s presidency attended by the former president and his wife, Rosalynn. The event, one of 13 hosted by Hofstra over the years on every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama, examined Carter’s legacy 10 years after he left office. Speakers characterized it by his "uncredited achievements and well-publicized failures," Newsday reported at the time.

Keynote speaker Stuart Eizenstat, Carter's assistant for domestic affairs, said the "neoliberal" Carter was hurt as much by liberal Democrats as by Republicans during his time in office, Newsday reported.

"Fierce resistance by the liberal wing of the party and its interest groups, some of whom saw him as a closet Republican, were unreconciled to the conservative mood of the country," Eizenstat said. "They had a cultural and regional bias toward him, challenged the direction he was taking the country, split the party asunder and unwittingly opened the door of the Oval Office to Ronald Reagan."

The second keynote speaker, Erwin C. Hargrove, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University at the time, described Carter as a good president who made the most of the political hand he was dealt and political winds that blew in favor of Republicans.

"Carter perhaps failed because he was ahead of his time," Hargrove said. "The cycle of politics and policy was turning in a more conservative direction."

Meena Bose, executive dean for Public Policy and Public Service Programs at Hofstra University’s Peter S. Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency, did not attend the 1990 event but said those views are consistent with the sentiments of many scholars who have noted that Carter served under difficult economic and political times.

"But then, of course, he went on to have a highly successful post-presidency winning the Nobel Peace Prize, being highly active in public housing policy, voting rights ... and really was quite active on the public scene until just a few years ago," Bose said in 2023.

A boy's wish came true

One Glen Cove teen will never forget meeting the former president more than eight years ago. 

In 2016, 10-year-old Carter Beckhard-Suozzi, who had Burkitt's lymphoma, met the former president through a visit arranged by the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Beckhard-Suozzi, now a 19-year-old sophomore at SUNY Binghamton and nine years cancer-free, said he wanted to meet Carter because they both suffered from cancer, both liked to help others and also shared a name.

The pair instantly clicked — the boy running into the former president’s arms for a hug the moment they met.

"It was very special getting to meet him," Beckhard-Suozzi recalled last year. "What he was talking about was amazing, Everyone was just hanging on his every word."

They discussed the presidency during the 30-minute meeting at the Carter Center. The fomer president also asked a staffer for five more minutes with the boy and his family in a moment the Beckhard-Suozzis cherished and the younger Carter mentioned in his college application essays, his mother, Jane Beckhard-Suozzi, told Newsday last year.

"It really sums up the man," Carter’s father, Ralph Suozzi, a first cousin of Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Glen Cove) and a former Glen Cove mayor, told Newsday in 2023.

A legacy of generosity

Presidential legacies evolve as political sensibilities change, but Carter's includes thousands of homes that will endure for decades. 

Habitat for Humanity officials on Long Island reflected on Carter’s work and legacy with the nonprofit and their mission to provide homes for families in need of affordable housing. 

Since 1984, Carter had worked with Habitat for Humanity International, partnering with the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project. The project is an annual home-building blitz that is responsible for constructing and repairing more than 4,000 homes in 14 countries with the aid of more than 100,000 volunteers. 

Myrnissa Stone-Sumair, a longtime local director for Habitat for Humanity, said in 2023 that Carter was an ambassador for the nonprofit whose legacy would be one of generosity.

"He was very much a part of Habitat International and what they were doing locally and globally," Stone-Sumair said, adding Carter would be remembered for his "unfailing commitment to a cause that he deeply believed in." 

'Making peace among peoples'

Carter may be best remembered for brokering an end to hostilities between Egypt and Israel, but one former Long Island rabbi said the former president also brought peace to a New York hospital room. 

Rabbi Steven Moss, the rabbi emeritus of the B'nai Israel Reform Temple in Oakdale, previously told Newsday in 2023 that when the Camp David Accords in 1978 between Israel and Egypt were signed, he was working as a chaplain at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. At the time, Moss had visited an Egyptian Navy admiral in one of the patient rooms who had been diagnosed with cancer to offer his prayers for healing and to wish their respective peoples shalom, the Hebrew word for peace. 

"He got up out of his bed, slowly, came to me, we hugged each other, and as he was embracing me, he said, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that at one point in time our peoples were shooting guns at each other, and now we can embrace each other in peace and love?’ " Moss recalled to Newsday. "That’s really what it’s all about, making peace among peoples." 

Moss, who now lives in Florida, said the spirit of the accords and the brokering of peace between the two nations would be an enduring part of Carter’s legacy. The accords led to the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab country.

"There are many ways that define a great man or a woman, and certainly the legacy that Jimmy Carter has left all humankind, not just the Jewish and Muslim communities, through the peace accords that he worked so hard on between Israel and Egypt will always leave its mark," Moss said.