Motown Founder Berry Gordy (Born November 28, 1929)
“Lillian’s grandfather, James Thomas Gordy, a plantation owner and county tax collector, fathered children with his white wife, Harriet, including Jimmy’s grandfather. He also fathered a son with his slave Esther Johnson. Their son, Berry Gordy, became the largest landowner in Washington County, Georgia. His grandson, Berry Gordy, Jr., was the celebrated African American founder of Motown Records. Jimmy Carter and Berry Gordy thus shared the same great-grandfather, though neither made note of it.” — His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life by Jonathan Alter, pgs. 25-26
I believe we should make note of our common ancestors and blood lines if we are to get beyond the color line and perceive one another as cousins. President Jimmy Carter and Motown founder Berry Gordy are second cousins. They both are descendants of Gordy men and women. Suppose President Carter and entrepreneur Gordy had made note of their kinship while Carter was President. Imagine a family reunion of the two branches of this Georgia family on the White House lawn back in the late 1970s? Wouldn’t a family reunion of the Carter and the Gordy family in the 1970s have advanced the idea that the most powerful white and black Americans were cousins, a music mogul on the Black Enterprise Top 100 listing of entrepreneurs and the most powerful man in the world were blood kin?
Perhaps, Alter should have developed the meaning of an American family in black and white more. It is hard to perceive someone as the Other if one bears the same family names in one’s heritage. President Carter’s mother was Lillian Gordy Carter.
Names don’t lie. Nor does DNA.
President James Earl Carter, Jr. (Born 1924)