As Americans honor the life of the late President Jimmy Carter on Thursday, many are looking back on his life and the amazing things that he did, like hiring a convicted murderer to be his daughter’s nanny.
The story may sound crazy or hard to believe at face value, but while in the White House in 1977, Carter hired Mary Prince, a young Black woman from Georgia, to be his daughter Amy’s nanny. The only caveat was that Prince had been convicted of murder in 1970 and sentenced to serve life in prison.
According to reports from Time magazine and the Washington Post, Carter and his wife, the former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, believed that Prince, now 70, had been wrongfully convicted of the murder.
To show their support, they backed her as Amy Carter’s nanny even though they received pushback from other members of the White House Staff, the media, and the public.
“Amy’s been much happier, since Mary (Prince) got out of prison and came up to the White House to be with us,” Carter wrote in his diary in late February 1977, according to the Washington Post.
Prince had been Amy Carter’s nanny for the six years prior to Carter’s 1976 election victory, and after he was sworn into office in 1977, she continued in the role.
According to a 1977 interview with People, Prince was raised in rural Georgia in a poor family and first started working for the Carters through a special prison work program in 1970. That program saw her nanny for their daughter in the Georgia governor’s mansion in Atlanta.
“I was thrilled,” Prince said at the time. “All my life, I had wanted to meet a governor or a president. But I was nervous, too. I wondered how the Carter family would take to me.”
Prince shared that despite her background, once she began working for the Carters, Amy took to her immediately.
“She liked me to sing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ to her every night, and I would rub her back and lie down with her. She would even cry at night because she hated to see me leave,” Prince told People, referencing how she would have to return to her prison at night.
Prince shared that her conviction stemmed from an incident where she attempted to break up a dispute between her cousin and a woman at a local bar. She and her cousin had gone out, and after her cousin got into a fight, she tried to step in to stop it, but a gun went off and killed the other woman’s boyfriend.
Eventually, Prince was charged, and after meeting with her court-appointed attorney for 10 to 15 minutes on two separate occasions, he entered a guilty plea on her behalf. However, it was for a murder charge, not involuntary manslaughter, which she was expecting.
“The whole time in court took less than an hour, and I was sentenced right there to life in prison,” she said.
In his 2006 book “Our Endangered Values” Carter wrote that her attorney had misled her and that she was “completely innocent.” He said that he thought she was a victim of the criminal justice system because of her race.
“She was fortunate and could just as easily have been executed,” Carter wrote. “If the victim had been white, we would never have known Mary Prince.”
Carter believed in Prince so much that after he won the election, he became a designated parole officer and asked the Georgia parole board for a reprieve so that she could leave the state. He then served as her parole officer.
After Carter lost his reelection bid in 1980, Prince followed the Carters back to Georgia and ended up living a few blocks from their home, Time magazine reported. She went on to work as their housekeeper while also babysitting for many of their grandchildren.
She was eventually fully pardoned by the State of Georgia.