Berry Gordy III & Jimmy Carter (and even Elvis)

 Factlet (9)

   You may not know who Mr. Gordy is, but you are likely to know about former President Carter. Mr. Gordy is a Black music executive who is worth hundreds of millions dollars more than the white Mr. Carter. Even though Mr. Carter had a head start (he is 97, Gordy 92), he was only a President and not in the entertainment industry. The executive lives in Bel Air, California the farmer still lives in Plains, Georgia. It is the case, however, that they are related and that is your factlet for this week. 

  One can learn a great deal from reading books and one can also learn a lot from others who read books. Recently, the writer Ian Frazier was asked this question: "What is the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?" Here is his answer:

"In Jonathan Alter’s excellent biography of Jimmy Carter, “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life,” I learned that the former president and Berry Gordy Jr., founder of Motown Records, are second cousins. Carter’s mother, Lillian Gordy Carter, was the granddaughter of James Jackson Gordy, a slave owner who fathered a second set of Gordy children by a woman he enslaved. Jimmy Carter and Berry Gordy share a great-grandfather, and are therefore half-second cousins, technically. Why neither Carter nor Berry Gordy ever made more of this remarkable fact I don’t know."

   I think you will agree that such a fact is "remarkable" and that it is surprising that it is also not a well-known one. I checked and it is true and you very likely did not know it. 

Sources:

   I also actually checked the biography mentioned by Frazier and you will find the remarkable fact on p. 26 of His Very Best....  By the way, I have only reported this black and white connection and otherwise have not commented about it. One needs to be careful these days. Mr. Alter, in the "Author's Note" at the beginning of His Very Best..., writes this:

"A note on usage: to accurately convey the vicious racism of Carter's youth and young adulthood, I occasionally quote the N-word but never use it in my own voice. Otherwise I use black, the most common usage of the 1970s, when Carter was in government. For older white southerners, like Carter's mother and father, I sometimes use Miss or Mr. before their first names because that is how they were widely known, though the failure to apply such honorifics to black southerners is yet another racial double standard." [Years ago, I mentioned to our neighbours the use of such honorifics and since then have been known as Mr. Jerry.]

The interesting factlet is also found elsewhere, and on the walkoffame.com where one learns this additional genealogical gem:

"Gordy, Jr. was the seventh of eight children born to the middle class family of Berry Gordy II and Bertha Fuller Gordy, who had relocated to Detroit from Milledgeville, Georgia in 1922. Gordy was brought up in a tight-knit family with strong morals. Berry Gordy II was the son of Berry Gordy I and a woman named Lucy. Berry Gordy I was the son of James Thomas Gordy, a white farmer, and a female slave in Georgia. This James Thomas Gordy was also, by his wife Harriet Emily Helms, the great-grandfather of Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, making Berry Gordy III and Carter second half-cousins. It is also through James Thomas Gordy that Berry Gordy and Elvis Presley are related."

   For the interview with Frazier see: "By the Book: Ian Frazier Wishes Somebody Would Write a Book About the World's Largest Beaver Dam," New York Times, Nov. 24, 2021.

The Bonus: 

   I hardly think you deserve one, given all that you have already learned. But, if you are elderly and remember Little Richard and Little Anthony and even Frankie Lymon, you may recall Jackie Wilson,  "Lonely Teardrops" and "Reet Petite." Berry Gordie wrote "Reet Petite", "a superlative meaning “fantastic,” was part of the jargon of the jazz age. "

My last Factlet was about Mort Sahl. To learn more about Redneck Genealogy see the post related to Levi-Strauss (!).