Many thought the president was fooled by Fidel Castro as the Mariel boat lift taxed South Florida. His indecision after the Liberty City riots angered many.

Jimmy Carter’s favorite moment in Palm Beach County might have been the time 2,500 people turned out for a book signing in 1995 at a Boca Raton bookstore.

His low point, at least in South Florida, likely was the day 15 years earlier, when he came to Miami’s riot-scarred Liberty City in 1980 and angry protesters tossed rocks at the presidential limousine.

Carter, who died Sunday at 100, was an unassuming but charismatic Georgia peanut farmer who rode post-Watergate anger to oust Gerald Ford from the White House in 1976 and become America’s 39th president. He was himself voted out four years later by Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” conservative wave.

He then spent the rest of his life becoming perhaps the most beloved former president, by becoming a respected elder statesman on numerous domestic and world topics and setting a standard for community service worldwide through numerous organizations, all while fighting advancing age and several health issues, including a bout with brain cancer.

Mariel boat lift, Iran hostage standoff, energy crisis tested Carter’s presidency

Carter’s struggles with Miami’s boiling summer of 1980 — a one-two punch of the Mariel boatlift from Cuba and the May race riots — might not have been on the same level as the humiliating 14½-month Iran hostage standoff, an energy crisis, and what Carter infamously called the nation’s “crisis of confidence.” But the image of people booing him at a Liberty City town hall meeting fed criticism that he was a nice guy who was in way over his head as president. And it helped cost him re-election that fall.

Carter had been the original anti-Washington outsider presidential candidate.

In February 1975, Carter, then 50 and fresh off wrapping up his term as Georgia governor, visited The Breakers in Palm Beach to speak at a money-raising dinner for a medical school. He drew little attention from passers-by as he told reporters, “Yes, I am a serious candidate” for president.

Almost exactly a year later, when he came through for a three-day campaign swing through Palm Beach and Broward counties, all that had changed. He had won the Florida primary in March, with 34% in a field of 12 Democratic candidates, and by the summer, he led the pack of 1976 Democratic presidential nominees. And by the end of that year, he was president-elect. He’d beaten Gerald Ford, 55 to 45%. In Florida, his margin was about 52 to 47%.

Over the next four years, Carter would deal with a full plate of issues. Some would become great successes: top among them the Israel-Egypt Camp David peace accords. But 1970s economic “stagflation” — weak job growth coupled with inflation — steadily eroded the nation’s patience and confidence in the man who had won them over by promising never to lie to them.

Early in 1980, his attention again would turn to Florida.

After six Cubans had crashed the Peruvian embassy on April 1, then-Cuban President Fidel Castro declared that anyone who wanted to boat down to the port at Mariel and pick up a loved one was free to do so. Carter announced the United States would take 3,500, saying on May 5, “We welcome you with an open heart and open arms.”

Castro called his bluff. In the ensuing weeks, South Florida absorbed 125,000. Miami-Dade County’s social services and schools were overwhelmed. Eventually, some refugees would migrate north, taxing Broward and Palm Beach counties and the Treasure Coast.

For Castro, it was a convenient purge of dissidents, the disaffected and troublemakers, whom his propaganda machine branded as unworthy “worms.” And he also took the opportunity to empty his prisons. About 10 percent of the refugees were Cuba’s most hardened criminals or people with mental illnesses. They fed a crime rate that became a national sensation. People suggested the wily Cuban dictator had hoodwinked an American president again.

That would have been more than Florida could handle. But other refugees, especially those who had arrived from Haiti to a far different welcome, complained newly arrived Cubans already were getting preferred treatment.

And then there was Arthur McDuffie.

From Liberty City race riots to Habitat for Humanity

On Dec. 17, 1979, the insurance salesman — black, 33, and with no criminal record — had been chased by police through Liberty City and ended up dead. District Attorney Janet Reno, who later would be Bill Clinton’s U.S. attorney general, took four white cops to trial, alleging they beat McDuffie to death and then covered it up. Blacks fed up with what they saw as decades of police abuse seethed and waited. In March, a judge, warning the case was “a time bomb,” moved the trial to Tampa.

It didn’t matter. When the officers were acquitted May 17, furious residents of Liberty City broke windows, looted, pulled white motorists from their cars and beat them to death and burned one shop after another. The violence would last three days and leave 18 dead, 400 hurt and $100 million in damage.

In a four-hour visit to South Florida, Carter was noncommittal about what the federal government would do — if anything — to help South Florida recover from a refugee crisis brought about by national policy, and rebuild neighborhoods burned after decades of building Black rage that certainly wasn’t specific to Miami. As Carter left a community center following a tense town hall meeting, people threw rocks, cans and bottles at his limo; one bottle hit it.

“The people are not easily fooled,” a Miami News editorial said, “and they have long memories, longer even than Mr. Carter may think.”

By July, Carter’s White House would reveal a package of aid. It was too late. Months later, Carter was voted out.

In the ensuing decades, his image would shift as he devoted his life to philanthropy and peacemaking. In 1989, now eight years into his forced retirement, Carter still was a popular figure when he addressed about 2,500 people at a $60-a-head benefit at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.

And two years later, he was back in South Florida with Habitat for Humanity, which builds affordable housing around the world. In that one week, he and volunteers would build 14 houses and a daycare center. The neighborhood: Liberty City.

Eliot Kleinberg retired from The Palm Beach Post in 2020 after a 36-year journalism career.