Thirty-ninth president appears at event in Tennessee with black eye but ‘feels fine’, according to spokeswoman

This article is more than 11 months old

This article is more than 11 months old

Former president Jimmy Carter has a black eye and needed 14 stitches after falling on Sunday at his home in Georgia.

The 39th president fell in Plains, Georgia, but still made it to a concert that evening in Tennessee to rally volunteers ahead of his 36th home building project for Habitat for Humanity.

He turned 95 on Tuesday, becoming the first US president to reach that milestone. His spokeswoman said earlier he needed some stitches above his brow, but “feels fine”,

On Sunday evening, Carter appeared on stage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville with his wife Rosalynn, 92, to talk to volunteers and supporters of the building project that runs until Friday.

Carter wore an Atlanta Braves baseball cap at the event. His left eye was swollen and bruised and he had a white bandage above his eye.

Habitat for Humanity (@Habitat_org) Working with Habitat since 1984, the Carters’ commitment serves as an inspiration for us all. https://t.co/SUjjkooPbz

Carter survived a cancer diagnosis in 2015 and this year surpassed George H W Bush as the longest-lived US president in history. He has had some trouble walking after a hip replacement in May, but regularly teaches Sunday school.

He has continued with his humanitarian work and also has occasionally weighed in on politics and policy, recently expressing hopes that his Carter Center would become a more forceful advocate against armed conflicts in the future, including “wars by the United States”.

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“I just want to keep the whole world at peace,” Carter had said as he presented his annual Carter Center report last month.

“We have been at war more than 226 years. We have been at peace for about 16 years” since the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he said, adding that every US military conflict from the Korean war onward had been a war of “choice”.

Carter also has accepted visits from several 2020 presidential candidates, but has held back on endorsing any of his fellow Democrats, offering only clues to his thinking.