I reached Jim Wallace after it was clear that President Jimmy Carter had gone into hospice care,

but it was unclear how long that would last.

I talked to a close friend of his, and it's, you know, it's hard to know how long he'll, he'll last at this long already.

Jim is a theologian, leads Georgetown's Faith and Justice Center.

In President Carter, he saw a fellow spiritual seeker,

someone who ended up as a very public face for a radical kind of faith.

Most Americans didn't know the term born again before Jimmy Carter or evangelical.

They wouldn't have known with those terms.

Now they're everywhere in our public narrative, but he was the first.

Part of what appealed to Jim about President Carter was the way he talked about race.

Jim Wallace is a quarter century younger than Carter, and he grew up evangelical in Detroit,

hundreds of miles away from Carter's home in Georgia. But both men describe asking hard

questions about why their white worlds looked so different from those of their black friends.

A few years back, the two gyms sat down together

for a public conversation about all this.

The concern of great lawyers was the separate but equal should prevail.

And that's the way I grew up.

Carter spoke about how, as a child, he simply accepted racial divisions, heading off to the

movie theater, holding hands with his black friends, thinking nothing of the fact that once

they arrived, they'd be forced to sit separately.

We got to the theater, I would go to the front and sit in the comfortable seats downstairs.

And my friends, AD and Johnny and Milton, we go to the back of the theater, go up to the third and third and see the screen.

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