In 1984 Jimmy Carter reflected on growing up in the segregated South. He recalled that, as a young child, he, like many white children, had had an African American child as his closest friend. The two children spent all their play time together. One day they travelled on the train from Plains to Americus. Carter went into one compartment; his young friend went into another. What struck Carter in retrospect was not that the facilities had been segregated but that, at the time, he had not thought anything about it. He noted how unthinking and pervasive the white Southern commitment to segregation had been.