A letter from Jimmy Carter

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In a leather box on a top shelf of my closet are a handful of the things most precious to me. There are a few gifts from mentors, a college award, a tie clip that my grandfather wore, some family artifacts and a letter from former President Jimmy Carter. The letter is precious because Carter changed me for the better.

In 2008, I was a moderately successful law professor at Baylor Law School. I had gone to teach there in 2000 after five years as a federal prosecutor in Detroit. I wrote academic articles, taught a variety of classes and received tenure after six years. I enjoyed my students and colleagues, and had made many friends in Waco. It was a satisfying and comfortable job.

Carter shook that up.

Over his century of work he had a lot of plans, and one of them was to bring Black and white Baptists together after a division of over a century. Together with one my former colleagues at Baylor, Bill Underwood, Carter organized an event at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta to unveil a “New Baptist Covenant” that would bridge that historic gap. Speakers in the enormous main hall included Carter himself, former President Bill Clinton, the Rev. William Shaw, Marian Wright Edelman, John Grisham and similar figures from across the racial divide. It was a striking event, full of hope for a new era — the kind of hope that Carter engendered several times in his remarkable career as a public servant and citizen.

My parents, who had long admired Carter, drove down from Detroit and a large contingent traveled in from Baylor, which is a Baptist university. There was some genuine and understandable wariness on the part of the Black Baptists about the gathering, rooted in centuries of racism and harm. But still, they came, and for a few days at least Carter’s hopes were realized.

While the former presidents and other luminaries spoke in the grand main hall, I was speaking, too — in a windowless basement room with rows of folding chairs. My topic was one that I knew well. For years I had been studying the 100-to-1 ratio between crack and powder cocaine used in federal statutes and sentencing guidelines, which directed the same prison sentence for trafficking 500 grams of powder cocaine or 5 grams of crack. The ratio produced shocking racial disparities, something I had seen firsthand as a prosecutor in Detroit. I had written a series of academic articles about the harm done by the crack-powder ratio and set out that critique at a number of law conferences. I knew my material.

What I didn’t know was that Carter was coming to my talk. Shortly after I began, he came in with a single Secret Service agent and settled into a chair a few rows in front of my parents. Now the pressure was on! As I finished the talk, I felt confident that I had done a good job of analyzing the problem and describing solutions. Of course, even as I was talking, I imagined what could come next: Carter rising from his seat to praise my presentation, as my parents beamed with pride.

My hope was only partly fulfilled. At the time for questions and comments, Carter did, in fact, rise to his feet to remark on my presentation. He did not rise to praise me, though. Instead, he talked about his frustration with academics like me who knew what the problem was but didn’t take the next step to fix it. It wasn’t a general observation, either — he challenged me personally to do more than write academic articles, to do what it took to actually create change. I left chastened.

His criticism stung because it was true. I went back to Waco and heard his voice in my head every day until it convinced me. I changed what I did. I kept writing academic articles, but I moved beyond that, too. I stayed up late at night at the kitchen table writing Supreme Court briefs and began to write for broader audiences in commentaries and at the Huffington Post. I sought out political leaders to press for a solution. Eventually, I left Baylor and Waco for Minneapolis in part because I was allowed to begin a clemency clinic at the University of St. Thomas, where I could work with students to directly help people serving sentences (mostly narcotics sentences) that were too long to serve any rational purpose. I became a different kind of professor.

Eventually, I wrote a book (“Prosecuting Jesus”) about some of these more direct efforts to create change and included the story of Carter confronting me in that basement room of the Georgia World Congress Center. Still moved by what he had done I sent him a letter and the book, thanking him. Gracious as always, he wrote me back, saying he was happy that I took his encouragement to heart.

I keep that letter in my box of treasures, but it is probably one of thousands he wrote to people like me. That Jimmy Carter, who offered challenges instead of praise, is now a part of history, too.

Mark Osler is Robert & Marion Short Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas.