Carter Will Refocus From World’s Woes to Atlanta’s

Former President Jimmy Carter, saying Atlanta’s success is hiding serious failures, announced Friday that he is diverting some of his energies from the world’s problems to focus on the aching poverty he sees at home.

Carter said he is not abandoning his international agenda but feels compelled to do something about domestic woes.

“Our current social condition is intolerable, if not fatal,” he said. “For the future good of our nation, we cannot allow our common life to deteriorate further.”

Carter’s plan, called the Atlanta Project, is to set up a task force through his Carter Center to deal with homelessness, drug abuse, teen-age pregnancy and other pervasive ills in Atlanta and other urban areas.

The 67-year-old Carter said he had “long felt uncomfortable” about being so involved in international concerns without giving equal attention to the problems at home. He said he will not be abandoning his international programs but will devote less time to them. He said also that he will give up teaching at Emory University, where he has been a professor for nearly a decade, to make time for the project.

The Atlanta Project is the first of its kind, Carter said. It will function under a simple premise: asking Atlantans to look after their neighbors.

“We might know our maids, but we don’t go to our maid’s home. We don’t sit down to have a cup of coffee, much less get to know her children or her problems,” Carter said. “We want to break those barriers down.”

Carter criticized Atlanta for being so dazzled by its recent successes that it cannot see its continuing failures.

Several major corporations have relocated to Atlanta in recent years, and Fortune magazine recently named it the best American city in which to do business. And the city will be host to the 1994 Super Bowl and the 1996 Olympics.

Yet Atlanta is one of the nation’s poorest big cities, second to Newark, N. J., and has a homeless population of 7,300, Carter said.

“Atlanta looks upon itself as a very successful city because we have wonderful attributes here,” he said. “We’re too proud of ourselves. There’s an unbridged chasm between rich people . . . and the suffering people in Atlanta, who are addicted to drugs, who’ve never had a decent job, who don’t have a place to live.

“Many of us don’t know a genuinely poor person. The people who are suffering are just as intelligent and just as ambitious as the rest of us.”