Berry Gordy and Jimmy Carter
Talk about unlikely connections.
The New York Times reports that Motown founder Berry Gordy and former President Jimmy Carter were actually related.
The Times reports:
According to a detailed family history compiled by Jeff Carter, one of the president’s sons, the two men were connected through a common ancestor in 19th-century Georgia: a white plantation owner named James Thomas Gordy, who fathered a child with a woman he held in slavery.
That child, born around 1854, was named Berry Gordy; the Detroit music impresario, whose full name is Berry Gordy Jr., is his grandson. Through the children he had with his wife, James Thomas Gordy was also the grandfather of President Carter’s mother, who was born Lillian Gordy.
In a statment to the Times, Gordy said:
“In 1978, my sister Esther commissioned a research institute to verify the Gordy family tree. You can imagine the shock and pride I felt when I discovered that President Jimmy Carter and I were actually third cousins. We had such fun discussing this in 1980 at a Democratic fund-raiser in Los Angeles. From that point on, we started calling each other ‘cuz.’”
