Motown

Chapter 1 Detroit Dreaming Berry Gordy Jr. was the seventh of eight children, born in Detroit on Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1929, just at the onset of the Great Depression. His father was the son of freed Georgia slaves who had become sharecroppers of a 168-acre patch of barren farmland that had yielded barely enough to keep the family going. Twenty-three children were born there, but fourteen died at or shortly after birth. Those who survived were tough. The mulatto Berry Gordy Sr.his own father was the child of a slave and her white plantation ownerwas a short, wiry man who did not get to high school until he was twenty-two because his family could not spare him from the backbreaking farming. Berry Gordy Sr. was thirtymature by local standardswhen he married Bertha, a short, cute nineteen-year-old schoolteacher of African and Indian descent. In 1922, three years into their marriage, Gordy made a deal that changed their liveshe sold a load of the farm's timber stumps for $2,600, a small fortune in rural Georgia. As word of the sale spread, the family worried that local whites might rob Gordy, so he traveled to Detroit, where his brother had recently moved, to cash the check. Once there, he never returned. Bertha and their three children joined him a month later. The promise of assembly-line jobs in auto plants had lured many southerners to Detroit since the mid-1800s. The Motor City's population boomed 1,200 percent during a fifty-year period that ended with the Great War. Ford was the first to break the racial barrier when it began hiring black workers in 1914. During the Roaring Twenties, Detroit had become America's fifth-largest city and its second-fastest-growing. And although Jim Crow laws were still widely entrenched and the city largely segregated, to many southern blacks Detroit offered genuine possibilities for progress. Berry Gordy Sr.'s start was not auspicious. Shortly after arriving, he used his share of the $2,600 windfall as a deposit on a cramped two-story home. It looked like a decent buyat $8,500until the Gordys moved in and discovered it was falling apart. Rotting plasterboard was hidden by fresh wallpaper, and bursting pipes had been concealed under duct tape. In the small space, the Gordys eventually had eight children who shared only three beds. Berry Jr. slept with his sister Gwen. The house was rat-infested, and the children often piled into the kitchen and watched in horror and fascination as their father killed giant rats. Once, a rat jumped from the oven onto Berry Sr.'s face, leaving him blood-covered and the children screaming in terror. For several years, Berry Sr. hustled through a string of odd jobs and frequently rented an empty lot where he sold everything from ice to coal, wood, Christmas trees, watermelons, and old car parts. Finally, he landed a gig as an apprentice plasterer for black contractors and in a year earned a union card. He then found steady work and saved enough to launch his own businesses. He not only started a carpentry shop but also bought the neighboring Booker T. Washington Grocery Store, as well as a print shop. When Berry Jr. was six, his family sold their decrepit house and moved to a better, two-story commercial building on the city's east side. (Years later, when Berry Jr. was a successful music mogul, he bought the street signs that marked the corner where their original home had been and planted them in his California backyard.) Racial strife in Detroit worsened as Berry Jr. grew up. World War II saw almost two hundred defense plants open in the Motor City, and despite Franklin Roosevelt's Fair Employment Practices Committee, almost one third refused to hire blacks. Poor whites flooded the city to fill new jobs, upsetting longtime black residents. In June 1943, whiPosner, Gerald L. is the author of 'Motown' with ISBN 9780375500626 and ISBN 0375500626.