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Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and later winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work, has died at the age of 100, the Carter Center said Sunday.
He died peacefully Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia, surrounded by his family, the human rights group he founded said in a statement.
Carter is the longest-lived president in U.S. history and celebrated his 100th birthday on October 1 this year.
His death comes more than a year after his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter, died in November 2023, and a year and a half after the ailing former president entered hospice in February 2023 Much later.
“My father was a hero, not just to me but to anyone who believed in peace, human rights and selfless love,” Chip Carter, the former president’s son, said Sunday.
The announcement comes just weeks before Donald Trump is set to begin his second term in the White House. The Carter Center said in October that Carter, a lifelong Democrat, had cast his mail-in ballot for Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris.
Carter’s own presidency was marred by rising inflation and the Iran hostage crisis. In 1980, Democrats lost a landslide re-election bid to Republican Ronald Reagan.
In the decades since leaving office, however, Carter has won widespread admiration for his extensive humanitarian work at home and abroad. He founded the Carter Center, an influential democracy and human rights organization, and became one of the most prominent volunteers at the affordable housing charity Habitat for Humanity.
Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 “for his peace negotiations, fight for human rights and commitment to social welfare.”
Carter gradually disappeared from public view in the years before his death. He visited Washington in 2018 to attend the state funeral of George H.W. Bush and played an audio clip at the Democratic National Convention endorsing Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential bid.
President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden visited the Carters in 2021.
The Carter Center said in February 2023 that “after a series of brief hospitalizations,” the former president had decided to forgo medical care and receive hospice care at home, more than a year and a half before news of the former president’s death broke. Carter had been treated for cancer and had suffered several falls in recent years.
In May 2024, Jason Carter said his grandfather was “really physically restricted” and “near the end of his life.” He also acknowledged the former president’s religious beliefs, saying: “Part of the journey of faith, you only live until the end, and I think he’s always been in that area.”
After losing his re-election bid in 1980, Carter returned to a modest two-bedroom ranch home in Plains, Georgia, a town of about 800 people, where he taught Sunday school at a local church into his 90s.
The former president and his wife were both born and raised in Plains.
Jimmy Carter will have a private funeral in the town about 150 miles south of Atlanta, following a state funeral in Washington and a public event in Atlanta, the Carter Center said Sunday.
