January 13, 2025
Inside former President Jimmy Carter’s shared ancestry with Motown Founder Berry Gordy.
The current passing of former President Jimmy Carter has introduced renewed consideration to his shared ancestry with Motown Founder Berry Gordy.
Carter, the thirty ninth president of america, died on Dec. 29 at 100. Earlier than his passing, his son, Jeff Carter, launched an in depth household historical past that traced their lineage again to cotton planters, Quakers, a spy for George Washington at Valley Forge, and a Nineteenth-century plantation proprietor who occurs to be Berry Gordy’s great-grandfather, the New York Occasions studies.
His shared ancestry with Berry Gordy, 95, highlights the painful historical past of slavery when enslaved Black girls had been typically compelled into relationships with their enslavers. This tragic apply connects Carter and Gordy by way of James Thomas Gordy, a white plantation proprietor in Nineteenth-century Georgia, who fathered a toddler with a lady he enslaved.
That little one, born round 1854, was named Berry Gordy, the grandfather of Motown music legend Berry Gordy Jr. By way of the youngsters James Thomas Gordy had along with his spouse, he additionally turned the grandfather of President Carter’s mom, Lillian Gordy.
Whereas no genealogical documentation, corresponding to census information and slave schedules, exists to show this blood relation, Gordy has recalled discussing the shared ancestry with the previous president throughout Carter’s re-election marketing campaign.
“In 1978, my sister Esther commissioned a analysis institute to confirm the Gordy household tree,” Gordy instructed the New York Occasions in a press release.
“You’ll be able to think about the shock and delight I felt after I found that President Jimmy Carter and I had been really third cousins. We had such enjoyable discussing this in 1980 at a Democratic fund-raiser in Los Angeles. From that time on, we began calling one another ‘cuz.’”
Jeff Carter, who researched the 216-page guide Ancestors of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter (2012), partly utilizing the Georgia State Archives, shared that his father had confirmed the household ties to Berry Gordy earlier than his passing.
“After I discovered about it, I requested Dad. He stated, ‘Yeah, all of them knew about it.’ It wasn’t a secret,” Jeff Carter stated.
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