He did lie and it's pretty cool
"But Carter knew he couldn’t get elected in 1970s Georgia as a supporter of civil rights. In fact, he’d tried running for governor four years earlier and lost—to a segregationist. So during his second campaign, he pretended to be a racist. And he pretended
hard, criticizing his opponent for saying good things about MLK and repeatedly praising George Wallace, the firebrand white supremacist famous for his thundering declaration that he wanted “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
This strategy of fake racism was so successful that Carter won the endorsement not only of the outgoing governor Lester Maddox—the guy who had beat him four years earlier—but also of the White Citizens Council, a full-on white supremacist group that had been formed during the backlash to
Brown v. Board of Education1. Carter—now known for his genial, grandfatherly demeanor—was, in 1970, so cunning and manipulative that he successfully convinced most of Georgia’s most prominent racists that he was on their side.
The charade was, of course, all for the greater good. In his inauguration speech, Carter did a full 180, announcing that “the era of racial discrimination in Georgia is over”—to audible gasps in the crowd. Maddox fumed, and angrily denounced the new governor as a traitor, but as far as I can tell, Carter never expressed any second thoughts about his disingenuous behavior during the campaign."
www.foxnews.com
