Jimmy Carter will be honored at the Washington funeral before burial in his hometown of Georgia

Jimmy Carter, who considered himself an outsider even when he sat in the Oval Office as the 39th US president, will be honored Thursday with a funeral at Washington National Cathedral before a second service and burial in his small Georgia hometown.

President Joe Biden, who was the first sitting senator to support Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign, he will pay tribute to his fellow Democrat 11 days before he leaves office. All of Carter’s living successors are expected to attend the funeral in Washington, including President-elect Donald Trump, who paid his respects before Carter’s casket Wednesday.

The rare gathering of commanders in chief is an example of how Thursday will be an unusual moment of comity for the nation. Days of formal ceremonies and remembrances from political leaders, business titans and ordinary citizens have honored Carter for decency and for using a prodigious work ethic to do more than achieve political power.

“He set a very high bar for presidents, how you can use voice and leadership for purpose,” said Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder whose foundation financed Carter’s work to eliminate treatable diseases such as Guinea worm. Gates spoke to The Associated Press on Wednesday, shortly before flying to Washington for the funeral.

“Whatever prestige and resources you are fortunate to have, ideally you can take them and take an even broader societal view in your post-private sector career,” Gates said.

Bernice King, daughter of the slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., compared the two Georgians and Nobel Peace Prize winners.

“Both President Jimmy Carter and my father showed us what is possible when your faith compels you to live and lead from a love-centered place,” said King, who also plans to attend the service in Washington.

Ted Mondale, son of Walter Mondale, Carter’s vice president, is expected to read a eulogy his father wrote for Carter before his own death in 2021.

Thursday will conclude six days of national rites that began in Plains, Georgia, where Carter was born in 1924, lived most of his life and died Dec. 29 at age 100. Ceremonies continued in Atlanta and Washington, where Carter, a fv. The naval officer, engineer and peanut farmer has been lying in the state since Tuesday.

Long lines of mourners waited several hours in frigid temperatures to drive past his flag-draped casket in the Capitol Rotunda, as tributes focused as much on Carter’s humanitarian work after leaving the White House as on what he did as president from 1977 to 1981.

After the morning service in Washington, Carter’s remains, his four children and extended family will return to Georgia on a Boeing 747 that serves as Air Force One when the sitting president is on board.

The outspoken Baptist evangelical, who campaigned as a born-again Christian, will then be remembered at an afternoon funeral at Maranatha Baptist Church, the small structure where he taught Sunday school for decades after leaving the White House and where his casket will sit under a wooden cross he shaped in his own woodshop.

After a final walk through his hometown, past the old train depot that served as his 1976 presidential campaign headquarters, he will be buried on family land in a plot next to former first lady Rosalynn Carter, who died in 2023 after more than 77 years of marriage.

Carter, who won the presidency promising good government and straight talk to an electorate disillusioned by the Vietnam War and Watergate, signed major legislation and negotiated a landmark peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. But he also presided over inflation, rising interest rates and international crises, losing in a landslide to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Two years later, he and Rosalynn established The Carter Center in Atlanta as a non-governmental organization that took them around the world fighting disease, mediating conflicts, monitoring elections and advocating for racial and gender equality. The center, where Carter rested before coming to Washington, currently has 3,000 employees and contractors globally.

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Associated Press writers Michael Liedtke in Indian Wells, Calif., and Kate Brumback in Atlanta contributed to this report.