The moment remains etched in the national memory: A 9-year-old girl, golden-haired and somewhat awkward, strolls to public school in the nation’s capital with the Secret Service in tow.

For Americans of a certain age, this and other images of Amy Carter – former President Jimmy Carter’s youngest child and the first young child to live in the White House since the days of President John F. Kennedy – defined something new and a thing for the public completely different president. Mr. Carter, a Baptist Sunday school teacher and former peanut farmer, was determined to live simply and modestly after the shocking scandal and national uproar of Watergate.

During Mr. Carter’s term, Amy Roller skating on the driveway near the South Lawn of the White House; had dinner with one of her favorite actorsJohn Travolta; and sat behind the historic Resolute desk, which had been returned to the Oval Office at her father’s request. Her cat, a Siamese named Misty Malarky Ying Yang, became famous.

Now, after decades of quiet life in the Atlanta area, Ms. Carter, 57, will be in the spotlight again as her family prepares to bury her father at a funeral that will be attended by dignitaries from around the world.

It is unclear how much of a public role she will take. When her mother, Rosalynn Carter, died in November 2023, Ms. Carter tearfully read aloud a love letter her father had written to his wife 75 years earlier, when he was serving in the Navy and they were separated.

“My mother spent most of her life loving my father,” she said. “Their partnership and love story was a defining feature of their lives. Since he is unable to speak to you today, I will share some of his words about how he loves and misses her.”

Those who know Ms. Carter say she is reserved to the point of shy. She taught art part-time at Paideia School, a private school in Atlanta that her two sons attended. Her name is not on the school’s website and the school did not respond to email messages.

“She’s a private person and likes to have a private life,” said Jan Williams, who taught Ms. Carter in 1976 when she was in the fourth grade in Plains, Georgia, while Mr. Carter was running for president.

Shortly after winning the presidency, Mr. Carter announced that his daughter would attend Thaddeus Stevens School, a public elementary school in Washington with a predominantly black student body.

Only one other sitting president, Theodore Roosevelt, had sent a child to public school. But Mr. Carter had accepted the Democratic presidential nomination by condemning the “political and economic elite” who were out of touch with the American working class.

“When public schools are substandard or torn apart by conflict, their children go to exclusive private schools,” he said at the time.

In Washington and across the country, Americans debated whether the president and first lady were making decisions about their daughter’s education to score political points. Amy has three older brothers – Jack, Chip and Jeff, all now in their 70s. Chip and Jeff Carter and their wives also lived in the White House for a time.

But the public’s attention was on Amy, who was so much younger than her brothers that some people assumed she was an only child.

“She didn’t like how much of a spotlight she was being put on,” Ms. Williams said. “She preferred to just do little kid things — running up and down the train tracks, climbing a tree, riding a bike.”

As a child, Ms. Carter cut a learned, innocent figure. She played in a treehouse designed by her father on the South Lawn of the White House. At Mr. Carter’s first state dinner in 1977, honoring the president of Mexico, she sparked a debate about etiquette after reading a book called “The Secret of the Screaming Clock” at the dinner table.

The next week, at a state dinner for the Prime Minister of Canada, she brought two books: “Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator” and “The Story of the Gettysburg Address.”

In any case, it was an extraordinary childhood. In a 1995 interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Ms. Carter recalled that she was particularly attracted to Anwar el-Sadat, the president of Egypt. “He was so nice and came and said goodnight to me before he left,” she said.

And she was “completely overwhelmed” when she met Mr Travolta and singer Cher, whose long fingernails were burned into her memory. “I feel like she talked to me alone for about an hour – I felt grown up,” she said.

Ms. Carter’s views seemed to carry weight with her father. During a presidential debate against Ronald Reagan in 1980, Mr. Carter told the audience that he had asked his daughter what she thought the “most important issue” was.

“She said she was thinking about nuclear weapons and controlling nuclear weapons,” Carter said.

For a short time, Ms. Carter was a newsmaker herself – a youth activist. In 1985, she was arrested at the South African embassy in Washington while protesting against the country’s racial policies under apartheid. The next year, as a freshman at Brown University, she was arrested at an anti-apartheid protest in Rhode Island. And later that year, she was arrested in Massachusetts along with 1960s anti-war activist Abbie Hoffman and others at a demonstration against the CIA’s involvement in Nicaragua under her father’s successor, Mr. Reagan.

Ms. Carter was charged with disorderly conduct, while several other protesters were charged with trespassing. She and 14 other people were tried and acquitted. In a 1986 interview, she said that her parents were “neither excited nor upset” by her activities.

“Amy is a very shy girl, contrary to the image you project in the news media,” Mr. Carter said at the time, adding that he agreed with her stance. “But she really believes in what she’s doing.”

In 1987, Ms. Carter severed her ties with Brown after she was asked to leave the company because she neglected her studies in favor of political activism. She said she was not expelled but chose not to return. Years later, in the NPR interview, she said the experience made her “think about what kind of environment I was really comfortable in,” and led her to return south to attend Memphis College of Art to study.

The last time Ms. Carter was in the public eye in a significant way was when she collaborated with her father on a children’s book called “The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer,” published in 1995. The story, about a boy who befriends a sea monster, was based on a fairy tale Mr. Carter made up to tell his own children.

Ms. Carter, then a graduate student in art history at Tulane University, created the illustrations. Mr. Carter said at the time that he wanted to write the book because it gave him the opportunity to work with his daughter.

Dr. William Foege, who served as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Mr. Carter and later was executive director of the Carter Center, said the experience brought the father and daughter closer.

“The two of them bonded over this book,” said Dr. Foege.

Ava Sasani contributed to reporting.