The early black college teams operated on shoestring budgets in the dangerous climate of segregation. They achieved success despite a culture that made travel nearly impossible, with no public restrooms, drinking fountains, restaurants, or hotels available to them. “A simple trip from one school to another was like plotting your way through a minefield,” McLendon said.
Over the next few years, McLendon put together such impressive teams that officials at nearby Duke University were inspired to issue an invitation for the young coach to sit on the Blue Devils’ bench during an upcoming game. The only stipulation, they said, was that McLendon would have to wear a white jacket so that he would appear to the crowd to be a steward.
McLendon politely declined.
The coach vowed never to put himself or his players in any circumstance where they might be disrespected or humiliated. “You did not want to get into a situation where your dignity would be destroyed right in front of your team,” he explained. Maintaining his players’ respect was critical in convincing them that they were every bit as good as whites.
A breakthrough came during World War II, when the military used Duke University’s medical school to train wartime physicians, several of whom were top-notch basketball players. The all-white med school team’s wins were trumpeted daily in the Durham papers. Meanwhile, McLendon’s undefeated team received no publicity. Upset over the disparity, Alex Rivera, McLendon’s team manager, arranged for the two teams to play a game. With the Klan vigilant to bar such a mixing of the races, the Duke coach agreed to a “secret game” on a Sunday morning with no fans or media allowed. By halftime, McLendon’s pressing, full-court team had doubled the score on its high-profile opponents. That’s when the white players approached McLendon’s bench and suggested that they evenly divide the roster among blacks and whites to compete in the second half.
It was the first great victory for McLendon against racism, one that opened his players’ eyes. Long after he had departed, McLendon’s influence was felt in North Carolina, first in the prominence of basketball in black communities across the state, and then more significantly at the college level. A highly innovative coach, McLendon was invited by the Converse shoe company to teach at its coaching clinics. It was at one of McLendon’s clinic presentations that a young assistant coach at the Air Force Academy named Dean Smith got his first blueprint for the famed four corners spread offense, which Smith confirmed in a 1991 interview.
McLendon and his friend Big House Gaines of Winston-Salem State came to be viewed as lions of the coaching business, but at the time neither coach could have fathomed that their sport would also help to break down the state’s racial barriers. Never could the coaches have imagined that in their lifetimes, black and white North Carolinians would embrace a black player the way they would embrace Michael Jordan.
Nor could the coaches have dreamed that they themselves would one day become members of the Basketball Hall of Fame named for James Naismith.
The Corn
Over his long lifetime, Dawson Jordan encountered none of the good timing that would mark his great-grandson’s experience. By the time Dawson turned twenty-eight, he had not only suffered great personal loss, but had been forced to change careers, with the disappearance of log rafting and the birth of the trucking industry. While he continued working at the local lumber mills, Dawson Jordan also became a sharecropper, like the majority of the southern population, the lowest on society’s totem pole for that era.
The critical element to survival on rented land was the mule. As such, the animal carried a status, as explained by a cousin, William Henry Jordan. “When I was a child, a mule cost more than a car, because you had to make a living with a mule.”
As farmers in later generations would purchase farm equipment, the sharecroppers and tenant farmers bought and rented mules from local dealers. Maurice Eugene Jordan recalled, “You could get a mule from [the mule dealer], but if you had a bad year, he’d come and get that mule. The seed and fertilizer man you borrowed from would do the same. You catch a bad season and get in a hole, it could take a year or two to get out.”
“You didn’t have a choice,” explained William Henry Jordan. “You didn’t have anything else.”
For men like Dawson Jordan and his son, there was no escape from the circumstances, but they somehow managed to keep themselves fed. Sometimes they worked early mornings, milking at a nearby dairy farm, then taking the cows out to graze. In the leanest times, a farmer might slip from tenant farming—where he leased land and handled everything himself—back into sharecropping. “That’s where you would furnish the labor,” William Henry Jordan explained, “and the people who owned the farm would furnish the mule, the seed, and the fertilizer. At the end of the season, you’d get a third to half of what was left over. Lots of times there was nothing left over.”
That’s why many farmers looked to other sources of income—and why moonshining became so important to so many of them. Farmers, both black and white, of the Coastal Plain had been making their own corn liquor as far back as the Colonial era. Most of them certainly didn’t have the money to buy it, so they made their own. “Since way back, that’s about all it was, was corn liquor,” explained Maurice Eugene Jordan. “So there was a lot of moonshine. They’d have them stills everywhere, on the river, in the woods, in the swamps, wherever the water was good.”
It’s unlikely that Dawson Jordan ever intentionally set out to be a moonshiner, but he soon gained a reputation as a prominent figure in Pender County’s illegal trade. Perhaps he first got into the business when he was working logs on the river. “Those rafts might have been full of whiskey,” Maurice Jordan said with a knowing laugh. “Nobody could tell what they were hauling.”
Corn liquor perhaps relieved the hardship a little. It certainly loosened up the atmosphere on long nights, making the conservative farmers amenable to a little gaming. The hardworking men of Pender County would roll the bones for a few pennies, nothing like the huge sums that Michael would wager decades later.
“Nobody had nothing to gamble with,” Maurice Eugene Jordan said. “Wasn’t no gambling but to shoot a little dice.”
That was the Jordan character. Work hard, and pick your spots for recreation. In that regard, too, Dawson Jordan was first in a line of Jordan men. He knew how to turn to the devil’s playground for a little fun. He liked a little drink, a little smoke, and perhaps a wee bit of action on a slow Carolina night.
The New Generation
As he gained adulthood in the 1930s, Dawson’s son, William Edward, came to be known as Medward. He found work driving a truck for a landscaping company. While he still helped his father farm, his modest salary meant they were no longer dependent solely on the ups and downs of a cropper’s life. Driving the small dump truck around the area to deliver landscaping materials also brought Medward a newfound status and the opportunity to meet people, a fairly dramatic change from the isolated life of a farmer. He became known as something of a ladies’ man in the community, according to family members.
In his late teens he took up with a pretty young woman named Rosabell Hand, a distant relative on his mother’s side of the family. She became his wife in 1935, and two summers later a son was born—Michael’s father. They named him James Raymond Jordan.
The couple would live for decades with Dawson Jordan yet never seemed to rebel against his commanding presence in their cramped household, the same one in which Michael Jordan and his siblings would grow up. Rosabell was as sweet and soft-spoken as her father-in-law was sonorous. As he neared fifty, Dawson took more and more to walking with a cane, but his word ruled the Jordan household.
As with most farming families, financial difficulty remained a steady companion for the Jordans, but they never seemed to allow that to affect their lives too deeply, family members recalled. Perhaps it was because Dawson had learned early in life that there were far worse things than coming up a little short on cash to pay the bills. When financial trouble struck h
ard enough, he finally did what other poor sharecroppers and tenant farmers had done. He packed up the wagon, hitched the mule, and moved on.
He didn’t have to go far for a fresh start. Dawson, his son, his pregnant daughter-in-law, and their small son settled in the farming community of Teachey, a mere twenty-five miles from Holly Shelter. Not long after they moved in, Rosabell gave birth to a second son, Gene.
In all, Rosabell Hand Jordan bore four children for Medward, and they in turn would produce a dozen grandchildren who regularly populated the modest household. In time, the Jordans saved enough through Medward’s work to purchase a tiny, inexpensive house on Calico Bay Road just outside of Teachey. It had three small bedrooms and an outhouse, but it was a castle for Dawson Jordan and his family. It would also serve as the center of a young Michael Jordan’s world.
Before long, the Jordans purchased additional lots along Calico Bay Road, as they continued to prosper with Medward’s work and Dawson’s moonshining, and the area blossomed into a small residential community. The emotional significance the property held for the family can be gauged by the fact that decades later the Jordans, despite all of Michael’s wealth, maintained ownership of the house and leased it out as rental property.
Along with their new prosperity, the most important shift in the lives of Dawson and his son was the presence of the deeply spiritual Rosabell Jordan. She shared an abundance of love with all her children and grandchildren—and even the children her husband fathered in his dalliances around the community. “Ms. Bell,” as she was often called, seemed to be especially proud of her oldest son. There was just something different about James Raymond Jordan. He had a special light and energy. For starters, he was plenty smart. By age ten, he was driving a tractor to help his father in the field and showing him how to fix it when it broke down. By the time he was a young man, he had impressed the entire community with his mechanical abilities and dexterity. Medward was said to be openly negative toward James, but the boy idolized his grandfather Dawson. One of James’s traits was the intense concentration he’d reveal by sticking out his tongue as he focused on a task. According to some in the family, sticking out the tongue was something James picked up from Dawson.
As he grew from a child into a teen, working alongside his father and grandfather, James moved easily in both Holly, where he was born, and in Teachey, where he grew up. “He was kind of quiet,” recalled Maurice Eugene Jordan, who attended Charity High School in Rose Hill with James. “If he didn’t know you, he didn’t do a whole lot of woofing.” However, if James knew you, he could be charming, especially with the ladies, just like his father, Medward. Like a lot of teens, he loved engines and baseball and automobiles, except that James was really good with all of them. Which meant that he usually had working transportation, conferring a special status on the teenaged James Jordan in the 1950s. He also had a taste for fun and knew where to find it on those nights when the full moon rose up and spilled its light across the Coastal Plain. While many blacks in the region sought to avoid white people wherever possible, that was not the way of Dawson or his grandson James.
Times remained hard for blacks in the 1950s. Many had served their country well in World War II, which in turn had encouraged the slightest loosening of the country’s negative mind-set. Yet the old attitudes still held a grip on North Carolina’s society, as the coming struggle for civil rights would soon demonstrate. Dick Neher, a young white Marine from Indiana, married a local girl and settled in Wilmington in 1954. Neher loved baseball, as did the nearby town of Wallace, so sometimes Neher would pick up some black guys he knew to ride up there to play. It’s likely that Neher played against James Jordan in the 1950s in Wallace. He didn’t play there long, however. Neher returned home one evening to find a pickup truck parked in his yard. Klan members were there to warn him about riding around with blacks and playing in mixed baseball games. Neher ignored the warning, but Klan members returned to his house. That second time, they told him they wouldn’t warn him again. Neher stopped going to Wallace to play baseball. He stayed in Wilmington, though, and much later became Michael Jordan’s youth baseball coach.
In such an atmosphere, Dawson Jordan and his family remained far too challenged by day-to-day living to place any sort of real trust in the future. Even so, family members and neighbors saw that James Jordan represented a generation that just might be able to move beyond the old world to something newer and better.
Little did anyone understand, in the early 1950s, what that newness might look like, or the strange ways it would blend hope and hurt. The easy assumption is that if the Jordans had only known the unimaginable things that the future held, they might have run toward it. Just as likely, some family members would later say, they might have fled.
PART II
EARLY TIMES
Chapter 3
THE INFLUENCE
IF HIS GREAT-GRANDFATHER Dawson Jordan first stoked the furnace of Michael’s life, it was Michael’s mother, Deloris Peoples, who brought fiery propulsion to the mix. She was born in September 1941 into a relatively prosperous family in Rocky Point, North Carolina. Her father, Edward Peoples, was a distant, some would say humorless man, known for his ambition and hard work. Among the many frustrated and penniless black farmers, a generation of men who spent their lives in overalls, confounded by an economic system that almost guaranteed their failure, Edward Peoples found rare success.
“I knew her father,” recalled Maurice Eugene Jordan. “Old man Edward Peoples, he didn’t sharecrop. He had his own farm.”
Denied any sort of access to the politics of that era, Edward Peoples was one of a number of North Carolina’s blacks who had focused instead on economic advancement. A “Black Wall Street” flourished in nearby Durham under the leadership of John Merrick, who founded several insurance companies and banks. Edward Peoples’s modest success was nothing on that scale, but the record indicates that he was tireless in his focus on making money. In addition to his farming, Deloris’s father also worked for Casey Lumber Company in Rocky Point, and his wife, Inez, labored as a domestic. While they were not wealthy, the Peoples were far from poor. Theirs had been a determined progress through the hazards and pitfalls that claimed so many farmers, white or black, in the early decades of the twentieth century. Like the Jordans, the Peoples had found their share of heartache in that era of disease and death. Still, they became landowners free to farm for their own interests. Although the Peoples are little known and seldom mentioned in the Jordan story, there’s no question that the family’s drive and work ethic factored into Michael’s mother’s approach to her own life and then to that of her famous son.
The Jordan family fable has been told again and again, but it is a false narrative in many key aspects, which is understandable. Whenever families have found immense fame and fortune in the spotlight, they’ve quickly constructed such mythologies. They’ve often done this out of self-preservation, to protect family members from the all-consuming media-driven pop culture.
Deloris Jordan had to shield her family from many situations as her son became famous in the 1980s. So it’s not surprising that she began the creation of such a narrative, one that omitted or glossed over many hard facts. She did this first in interviews and later in her book, Family First, which offered child-rearing advice, by implication, on how families could raise their children to “be like Mike.” The bestselling book would enable Mrs. Jordan to travel the world, making public appearances in support of family issues.
The reality of Deloris Jordan is so much more powerful than the made-up story because it reveals her character and, later in her life, her ability to move her own family through brutal circumstances. There’s little question that the obstacles Deloris Jordan faced fired her efforts in raising her family. As a result, they also provided the very fuel of Air Jordan.
Rocky Point
Appropriately, the families that would become Michael Jordan’s gene pool first met on the hardwood in a cramped gym filled with che
ering students. According to vague community and family memories, James and his younger brother Gene Jordan played for Charity High. Deloris’s brothers, Edward and Eugene Peoples, played for the Rocky Point Training School of Pender County. The two schools enjoyed a rivalry back in those days, and folks in the community recall that the Peoples boys were good players.
They also recall the love students and faculty had for Rocky Point. Opened in 1917, it was one of five thousand schools, shops, and teachers’ homes built for African Americans in communities across the country with money provided by the Rosenwald Fund, a trust set up by Sears, Roebuck and Company president Julius Rosenwald. The equipment wasn’t always the best; used furniture and books, often with pages torn out, were passed down from the county’s white schools. “We got what they had worn out,” recalled William Henry Jordan, a relative of the family. But in an age when black education was at best an afterthought for local school boards, the school’s dedicated teachers prepared students for every sort of challenge, which made Rocky Point important to the African American population of Pender County right up until integration in the late 1960s.
Basketball games were played after school, in a space cleared in the school’s auditorium, and usually lasted until the early evening. Deloris originally told reporters that the contest that brought her and James together occurred in 1956, when she was fifteen. However, she corrected that miscalculation in Family First, explaining that, in fact, she first met her husband after a 1954 game.
Michael Jordan Page 3