Jimmy Carter left office more than 30 years ago, but the former president thinks many of the problems facing the United States then are as prevalent as ever. In a wide-ranging interview with The Atlantic, the man from Plains, Georgia, says he is "prouder today" of being a Southerner following South Carolina's removal of the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds in Columbia. Still, he says he worries that "obvious, extreme racism" is even more of a problem now in the United States than it was in the 1970s:
After the civil rights movement was successful — about 100 years after the end of the War Between the States, the Civil War — there was a general feeling in this country that the main elements of racism, of white superiority, had finally been overcome. With the news media showing the police abuse toward black people in some places, and the terrible events in Charleston, South Carolina, maybe we've been awakened to say that we've still got a long way to go. [The Atlantic]
Read Carter's full interview — in which he expounds on everything from gay marriage to evangelizing "several hundred" people as a born-again Christian — over at The Atlantic.
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