In May 1974, Governor Jimmy Carter delivered a blistering Law Day address at the University of Georgia to a distinguished audience of lawyers and public officials, along with members of the press corps. Quietly preparing to run for the presidency two years hence, Carter decided to shake things up, forsaking the usual honorifics in favor of some startling remarks about the oppressive unfairness of American criminal justice. He forthrightly denounced a rigged and racist system that patently served the interests of the affluent and powerful at the expense of everyone else, especially the poor. His voice rising in anger, Carter called to account “everyone in this room who is in a position of responsibility as a preserver of the law in its purest form,” himself included.
Nearly as unorthodox as Carter’s denunciation were his remarks crediting two writers with shaping his thoughts on “what’s right and wrong in this society,” both surprising names for a conventional politician to mention. One was the renowned theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose Christian realist theology had strong political implications, at odds with naïve liberal do-goodism and equally naïve conservative narrowness about the one true faith. The other influence, Carter said, was “a great poet named Bob Dylan,” whom he called a friend. (The two had met three months earlier when Carter invited Dylan, then on tour with The Band in Atlanta, to the governor’s mansion.) As he cited Niebuhr on establishing redemptive justice in a sinful world, so he cited Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” and more, on the same theme and on “the dynamism of change in a modern society.”