I Died & Jesus Told Me Why The Devil Has Been Targeting Black People For Centuries (NDE)
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES — A STORY THAT TRAVELS THROUGH MEMORY, FAITH, AND A COUNTRY STILL ARGUEING WITH ITS PAST
In a quiet apartment overlooking a narrow stretch of river in northern Manhattan, 78-year-old Naomi Carter sits by a window she rarely opens in winter. On her coffee table lies a worn notebook, a Bible, and a stack of printed pages filled with handwritten corrections.
She speaks slowly, with the careful rhythm of someone who has repeated her story many times but still cannot fully control how it lands.
“I need you to understand,” she says, “this isn’t something I decided to invent later in life. I lived it the way I lived anything else that was real to me.”
Carter’s account spans continents of experience but is now firmly rooted in the United States—specifically the American South, Midwest, and East Coast. She describes a life shaped by racial ideology she now rejects, a transformative relationship with a Black man she met in the early 1980s, and a near-drowning incident at a university swimming facility in Ohio that she says changed the course of her life.
But what has drawn renewed attention in recent years is not only the biography itself—it is what she claims happened decades later, after the death of her husband, during what she describes as a “near-death experience” in her home in New York City.
Medical professionals caution that such experiences are deeply subjective and often associated with neurological stress, trauma, or grief. But Carter insists her experience was more than internal imagery.
“I know what people will say,” she says. “But I also know what I saw—or what I was shown.”
Her story, once private, has now become part memoir, part testimony, and part public controversy.
CHAPTER 1: GROWING UP IN A DIVIDED AMERICA — ALABAMA, 1948
Naomi Carter was born in 1948 in rural Alabama, during a period when racial segregation was still legally enforced across much of the United States. Schools, public transportation, housing, and even swimming pools were separated by law and custom.
Her father worked as a county administrator. Her mother taught piano to children in the community. Carter describes her upbringing as orderly, devout, and intellectually sheltered.
“We were taught a worldview,” she says. “It wasn’t questioned. It was inherited.”
She attended church in a conservative Protestant tradition that, like many institutions in the American South at the time, rarely challenged segregationist interpretations of scripture.
Historian Dr. Elaine Matthews, who studies religion in the Jim Crow era, says Carter’s description is consistent with documented patterns.
“Many white families in the mid-20th-century South absorbed segregation not only as law but as moral structure,” Matthews explains. “It was reinforced socially, politically, and theologically.”
Carter recalls participating in civic organizations and public discussions as a young adult that supported segregationist policies. She does not minimize it.
“I wasn’t neutral,” she says. “I believed it was right.”
CHAPTER 2: NEW ORLEANS AND THE SHIFTING LANDSCAPE OF AMERICA
In the 1970s, Carter moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, where she pursued academic work in development economics. The city was undergoing its own complex transition following the Civil Rights Movement, with schools and public institutions slowly integrating.
Carter describes herself during this period as outwardly polite but internally unchanged.
“You can live inside a system,” she says, “and still carry it with you when you move.”
She continued her academic career, teaching and researching at what she describes as a major Southern university, while maintaining emotional distance from the rapid social change around her.
It was in this context, she says, that she encountered a young man who would later become her husband.
CHAPTER 3: THE SWIMMING POOL INCIDENT — OHIO, 1980
The pivotal event in Carter’s narrative took place not in Louisiana, but in Ohio, where she had accepted a visiting academic position at a university in Columbus.
One afternoon in 1980, Carter was swimming alone at a campus recreational facility when she experienced a medical emergency in the water.
“I felt my body shut down,” she recalls. “I went under very quickly. I remember thinking there was no sequence anymore—just panic and silence.”
A young graduate student in engineering, a Black man named Solomon Carter, noticed her distress and entered the pool to assist her.
According to Carter’s account and campus incident reports reviewed in her personal archive, he pulled her from the water, administered immediate assistance, and remained with her until emergency personnel arrived.
He later accompanied her to the hospital and stayed for several hours.
Medical staff at the time documented a non-fatal near-drowning episode.
For Carter, however, the significance was not medical—it was relational.
“I had no category for what he did,” she says. “Everything I believed about people like him was suddenly not useful anymore.”
CHAPTER 4: A RELATIONSHIP THAT DEFIED EXPECTATION
What followed was an unusual friendship that developed into a long-term relationship and eventual marriage.
Solomon Carter, originally from New Orleans, was the son of a working-class family and the first in his household to pursue advanced technical education.
Friends described him as calm, deliberate, and deeply religious.
“He wasn’t interested in changing her,” says Dr. Marcus Hill, a sociologist who later studied interracial relationships in post–Civil Rights America. “He was simply consistent. That consistency had an impact.”
The relationship faced resistance from both social environments they moved between—Carter’s Southern academic circles and Solomon’s community in New Orleans.
Despite this, they married in 1983.
They eventually settled in Louisiana, raising a daughter, Priya Carter, who now works as a physician in Atlanta, Georgia.
Solomon Carter died in 2022 from heart-related complications at age 66.
CHAPTER 5: GRIEF, ISOLATION, AND A SHIFT IN CONSCIOUSNESS — NEW YORK, 2023
After her husband’s death, Naomi Carter relocated to New York City, where her daughter lives part-time. It was there, she says, that her most controversial experience occurred.
On March 14, 2023, Carter was sitting in her living room when she experienced what she describes as a sudden transition in consciousness.
“I was there, and then I wasn’t,” she says.
She claims she entered a state of awareness she cannot fully describe, characterized by light, presence, and emotional intensity.
Medical experts note that grief, especially prolonged bereavement in older adults, can produce dissociative episodes, vivid hallucinations, or dreamlike states.
Dr. Helen Roberts, a neurologist at Columbia University, says:
“Near-death experiences and grief-induced altered states often share similar phenomenology: brightness, presence, emotional certainty. The brain under stress can generate extremely coherent narratives.”
Carter, however, rejects purely neurological explanations.
“It wasn’t confusion,” she says. “It was clarity.”
CHAPTER 6: WHAT SHE CLAIMS SHE WAS SHOWN
Carter’s account of the experience shifts from personal memory into interpretive testimony.
She claims she experienced a presence she identifies as Jesus, who, in her telling, communicated insights about her life, her past beliefs, and the broader history of racial injustice in America.
Importantly, Carter emphasizes that what she received was not a political message but a moral and spiritual reframing of history.
In her interpretation, she was shown:
scenes of American slavery and its long-term consequences
the resilience of enslaved people and their descendants
historical figures associated with abolition and civil rights movements
the development of Black churches and spiritual traditions in the United States
Historians note that these themes align with documented cultural history, though Carter attributes the meaning of these visions to divine interpretation.
“What I understood,” she says, “was not about superiority or hierarchy. It was about humanity, endurance, and dignity.”
She also claims she was instructed to reconsider her life story publicly, despite fear of criticism.
CHAPTER 7: A MESSAGE THAT SPREADS BEYOND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
Over the past year, Carter has begun sharing her account in small gatherings, faith-based discussions, and recorded interviews posted online.
Reactions have been sharply divided.
Some religious listeners view her story as a testimony of transformation and repentance.
Others see it as a psychological narrative shaped by grief, aging, and suggestion.
A theologian at a seminary in New York, Dr. Paul Reynolds, offers a measured interpretation:
“Whether one accepts the supernatural framing or not, what is clear is that she is grappling with moral responsibility and historical awareness. That alone is significant.”
Carter, for her part, resists being categorized as symbolic.
“I am not a metaphor,” she says. “I am a person who lived through all of it.”
CHAPTER 8: FAMILY, LEGACY, AND CONFLICTING INTERPRETATIONS
Carter’s daughter, Priya, plays a central role in how the family navigates the public attention.
“She’s my anchor,” Carter says. “She listens without judgment.”
Priya Carter has not publicly endorsed all aspects of her mother’s claims but has defended her right to speak.
In a brief statement, she said:
“My mother is sharing her lived experience and her understanding of it. People can interpret it as they choose, but I know her sincerity.”
CHAPTER 9: THE BROADER CONTEXT — AMERICA AND MEMORY
Carter’s story arrives at a time when the United States continues to confront its historical legacy of racial inequality, from education debates to public memorialization and cultural discourse.
Sociologists note that personal narratives like Carter’s often gain attention because they blend private memory with national history.
“Stories like this resonate because they sit at the intersection of guilt, transformation, and identity,” says Dr. Hill. “They are not just personal—they are reflective of unresolved collective history.”
CHAPTER 10: BETWEEN BELIEF AND EVIDENCE
Whether Carter’s account is understood as spiritual testimony, psychological experience, or narrative reconstruction, it raises enduring questions about memory and meaning.
What happens when a person’s worldview changes late in life?
How do societies evaluate subjective experiences that cannot be externally verified?
And how should history be carried by individuals who once lived on the opposite side of its moral conclusions?
Carter does not claim to have answers to all of this.
“I just know I can’t go back to who I was,” she says.
She pauses, looking out the window toward the river.
“And I don’t think I was meant to.”
EPILOGUE: NEW YORK CITY — PRESENT DAY
As the interview concludes, Carter returns to her notebook. Outside, traffic moves steadily through the streets of New York, indifferent to the weight of personal revelation.
Her story remains unresolved in the public sense—neither confirmed nor disproven, neither fully accepted nor dismissed.
But in her own words, resolution is not the point.
“The point,” she says quietly, “is that I’m still here. And I’m still saying it.”