A South Sudanese refugee wearing a yellow hoodie smiles at the camera while standing in front of the Carter Presidential Center entrance. Behind him are two bronze statues depicting African figures, and a small fountain is visible in the background. The Center’s name is prominently displayed in large letters above the entrance.

Luke Kur Malith (photo-illustration by Stacy Reece)

Like a Prayer

As the world prepares to bid farewell to Jimmy Carter, a refugee’s visit to his presidential library reveals the far-reaching impact of his post-presidency work.

By Doug Cumming

Jan 4, 2025

We were an odd pair, Luke Kur Malith and I, browsing through the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum. Ten days later, all the world would be thinking about Jimmy Carter. But on that mid-December afternoon, with few other visitors, Luke and I had the place almost to ourselves to contemplate Jimmy Carter’s 100-year lifetime.

It must have been obvious to the woman selling tickets: I was just an old Atlanta white man providing a local experience to my international guest, a tall young man from South Sudan with a gentle gait and brilliant teeth. But Luke was not just the visiting sightseer he might have seemed. He was a war refugee, making up for lost education in childhood by absorbing new languages, histories, and cultures with a quiet attention that astonished me. He laughed naturally and hugged and shook hands with genuine joy.

His origins amazed me enough. In childhood, Luke had attended cattle instead of school, spoke only Dinka, swam across rivers lurking with snakes and crocodiles, had several bottom teeth pulled to prove his bravery in a Dinka rite of passage, and fled his village on bare feet when tribal conflict killed or scattered his family.

He possessed his own history and loyalties with kinfolk. While I was musing on some part of Jimmy Carter’s story at the Naval Academy or in his family peanut and cotton warehouse, Luke was on his cellphone talking in Dinka or Swahili to a cousin or friend.

My history and loyalties, in contrast, were all around me here. Governor Carter’s press office in the State Capitol was my start in journalism, a brief college internship. My mother campaigned for him in the 1976 Peanut Brigade. My father covered him for Newsweek, and his assistant Eleanor Clift (like so many others from my home state of Georgia) followed Carter to Washington after Carter won the presidency. She became a fixture of the White House press corps. In January 1981, I was working in Rhode Island at the Providence Journal-Bulletin, where I watched Carter’s sad last day as president on the newsroom TV. Looking back, Carter’s exile from that time seemed parallel to my own, until I returned South in 1989.

After that, the Carter Center’s good work in international public health and democracy always seemed on the edge of my life and my neighborhoods. I was optimistic when he tried to bring his global work (for justice and human rights) back home with ‌the Atlanta Project. I got to feel a bit like Jimmy Carter when I worked on Habitat for Humanity projects, or taught a Sunday school class.

We look for definitive causes of our Civil War: it was slavery, we say, not states’ rights. In the Sudans, the complexity of the conflict confounds American innocence: ethnic, religious, economic, tribal, military, etc., with guns supplied by global rivals.

But all that turned into nothing that afternoon at the Jimmy Carter Library as I started seeing Jimmy Carter through Luke Kur Malith’s eyes.

I tried to summarize the American Civil War to Luke, pointing out that U.S. Army General Sherman stood on this very hill as he looked west to where Atlanta’s skyline now strutted. But our domestic war seemed fairy-tale distant from Sudan’s civil wars, which have killed and exiled millions since the end of colonialism in the 1950s. We look for definitive causes of our Civil War: it was slavery, we say, not states’ rights. In the Sudans, the complexity of the conflict confounds American innocence: ethnic, religious, economic, tribal, military, etc., with guns supplied by global rivals. With the Muslim/Arab north, out of Khartoum, fighting the Christian/animist Black South, the largest nation in Africa was finally split in 2011 to create the newest nation on earth— South Sudan.

After Luke visited the Carter Library with me, he learned that Jimmy Carter flew to his country in 2011 to oversee the referendum that created it, a historic vote that created a short-lived hope for peace. Luke was about twelve years old then, though he doesn’t know his actual birthday. He emailed me from his college outside Chicago after Carter died December 29.

“He was an amazing person to the people of South Sudan,” Luke wrote.

Luke is a sophomore on a full-ride scholarship at Elmhurst University, a small college from which the famous theologians H. Richard and his brother Reinhold Niebuhr both graduated. The Niebuhrs' work “had a powerful effect on my attitudes toward politics,” Carter wrote in his final book, Faith: A Journey for All. Luke is studying economics and is interested in the law, subjects he imagines his country could use when it becomes more stable.

During our stroll through the Carter Library, we passed a line of portraits of every U.S. president in Jimmy Carter’s lifetime, from 1924 onward. I tried to explain the philosophies and personalities of Hoover, FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and so on. Luke bent over to hear me better, intensely interested. Then we came to a display in the middle of this line of famous Americans—a commemoration of Carter’s inauguration and a photo of him smiling among other living ex-presidents.

“Jimmy Carter,” Luke pronounced, reverently. Throughout the visit, I noticed Luke saying the name again and again, like a prayer.

In his village of Paliang, Luacjang community, Warrap state, South Sudan, there was another Carter Center. Almost every village around there had a “Carter Center,” Luke recalled. When he was growing up, he did not know this same “Carter” was also a famous American president. He knew only that this was the man who set up the simple drinking-water filters and medical teams to fight the dreaded Guinea worm disease. Luke had seen the awful skin lesions of other children who were infested with the spaghetti-like, parasitic worm, grown inside them as long as a meter then breaking out from their skin. We watched in a Carter Library video this gruesome worm being extracted from a small Black body. Guinea worm disease caused pain, disfigurement, and often death for millions. Now, it is virtually gone throughout Africa, thanks to one of the Carter Center’s many health initiatives there. (The woman selling tickets told us the Center’s latest report showed only eight cases.)

Luke was learning so much more about this man, Carter. I already knew a little about the work Jimmy Carter had done negotiating peace agreements around the world. After leaving the White House, you learn at the Carter Library, he recognized that only a non-government entity like an ex-president could mediate in a conflict where official Washington was bound to favor its official counterpart—and America’s official interests—in a conflict.

I knew about his monitoring of important elections. In 1989, a friend of ours, Tony Friedrich, was killed in a Honduran plane crash while returning with a team of other Washington lawyers who were helping set up a Nicaraguan election under an observer council that Carter led.

Luke, from life experience, knew more about Jimmy Carter than I had ever known. He knew something about a certain spirit of global consciousness that seemed to pour out of Carter.

But Luke, from life experience, knew more about Jimmy Carter than I had ever known. He knew something about a certain spirit of global consciousness that seemed to pour out of Carter.

Carter wasn’t perfect. Or maybe he was perfect, and that was his problem. His hard-working Baptist “righteousness” grated on some people. It’s hard to be persnickety about truth-telling, as Carter was, without sounding like a prick.

But that global consciousness animated the work of the Carter Center here in Atlanta, and I believe it has spread to countless others. Did some little piece of it motivate my wife, Libby, and me to help tutor and support Luke through our church’s connection with Hope House in Kenya? Was it in Troy D. VanAken, the president of Elmhurst University, when last year he paid for Luke to fly back to Kenya, where Luke got a dental bridge to fill in for his missing lower teeth?

Luke Kur Malith is proud of his teeth now. They really are brilliant. More importantly, he is a truly honest and gentle soul, now on his way to a bigger, better life.

Leaving the Carter Library, I heard Luke pronounce the name again, quietly.

“Jimmy Carter.”

Like a mantra for the world.

Doug Cumming

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Doug Cumming is an associate professor emeritus of journalism at Washington & Lee University with 26 years experience at metro newspapers and magazines. After getting at Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in mass communications, he has taught multimedia reporting and feature writing at Loyola University in New Orleans and at W&L in Virginia. Earlier, he worked at the newspapers in Raleigh, North Carolina, Providence, Rhode Island, and Atlanta, Georgia; was editor of the Sunday Magazine in Providence; and helped launch Southpoint monthly magazine in Atlanta. He won a George Polk Award and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. He also plays a mean saxophone. He now lives in Decatur, Georgia.