Michael Jordan Family History

Michael Jordan was born on February 17th, 1963 to James and Deloris Jordan in Brooklyn, New York.  However, Michael did his growing up in Wilmington, North Carolina where his family returned to after their stay in New York.

He played basketball at Laney High School well enough to get a basketball scholarship at the University of North Carolina.  After starring with the Tar Heels, he was selected by the Chicago Bulls as the third overall pick of the 1984 NBA draft.

Chicago Bulls.  Michael played fifteen seasons in the NBA, winning six championships. He was integral in popularizing the NBA around the world in the 1980’s and 1990’s and became a global cultural icon in the process.

He is considered by many to have been the greatest basketball player of all time.  Only LeBron James among contemporary players may begin to match him.

Slavery and Sharecropping in North Carolina

Michael Jordan’s roots are in the rural South, to be precise in the stretch of land between Wilmington and Wilson (along where U.S. 117 now runs) in Pender county, North Carolina.  There have been Jordans living on that corridor since the Civil War.

From Slavery to Emancipation.  The first Jordan of record was John Jordan.  There is no history showing where he was born or where he was held during his years of slavery.  The most likely explanation is that he worked at the Stag Park plantation of Jesse Jordan, formerly a white preacher from Georgia, and perhaps took his Jordan name on emancipation.

His son Richard was born a slave in 1862.  Everyone called him Dick. In the reported sixty-four years that he lived before he died in a Wilmington hospital, he went from slavery to owning his own home. He learned to read and could borrow the supplies needed to farm vegetables on his own credit. Like the men in a lot of families, he was a truck farmer. On Dick’s death certificate, filled out with a typewriter, is the only evidence that his father ever lived.

The Hand family, also coming up from slavery, were near neighbors of Dick Jordan in Pender, North Carolina.  Charlotte Hand was the mother of Dick’s son Dawson, born in 1892.  Dawson apparently grew up in the Hand household (when he married in 1914 he stated that his father was deceased).  Later, Dawson’s son William married Rosa Hand in Pender in 1937.

Sharecroppers.  Dawson lost his wife Clemmie in 1916 soon after the birth of their child, but lived onto 1977.  In 1920 he took in boarders, Ethel Lane and her young daughter, and he officially married Ethel seven years later.  However, she was not around at the time of the 1930 census.

Dawson’s son William by Clemmie started working at fifteen at his father’s farm at this time.  He married at twenty-one and he and his wife Rosa had five children, including Michael’s father James.

It was a hard life as a sharecropper and living through the Depression.  Michael can remember his grandparents William and Rosa still eating dirt and clay – a now little-known practice brought to the South from Africa – and getting needed iron from the land.  He used to eat the orange and red clay for dessert when he’d visit them.  William died in 1990 at the age of seventy-five.

James and Deloris Jordan

James and Deloris Jordan, childhood sweethearts, were married in Virginia in 1957 and later, looking for a chance to better themselves, moved north.  They went to Brooklyn where James attended a trade school.  But not for long.

Soon after their fourth child Michael was born in 1963, they began worrying about the crime there and made the move back to Wilmington, North Carolina.  Michael grew up there with a military father and a New Testament mother, both of whom were raised in Old Testament homes.  A somewhat combustible mixture!

In 1985 their life changed, thanks to Michael who was then in his second season in the NBA with the Chicago Bulls.  They sold the home where he’d grown up and James and Deloris had raised their family.  Charlotte, North Carolina was the beginning of a new kind of life for them, just as Chicago was for Michael.

Disaster!  But later tragedy struck.  On July 23rd, 1993 James pulled over on the side of highway 74 in Lumberton, North Carolina to take a nap after returning from a funeral. During that time two men approached James’ vehicle, shot him to death and stole his vehicle. He was 56 years old.

Since that time his wife Deloris has had her ups and downs.  She has moved away from North Carolina to Chicago.  There she helps to run the James R. Jordan Foundation which provides support for children and families in the community.

They both should be proud of their children.  Not just of Michael.  James (Ronnie) was a Command Sergeant Major with the US Army before his retirement in 2006.  And perhaps proud of his daughters Deloris and Rosalyn who are both accomplished authors with published books to their name.

Michael Jordan’s Family Tree

• John Jordan (b. 1834) m. Alice Williams (b. 1838) in Pender, North Carolina, born into slavery
• – Richard (Dick) Jordan (1862-1926?), truck farmer, born into slavery

• Richard (Dick) Jordan m. Charlotte Hand (1869-1920) in Pender,  North Carolina.  Charlotte rem. Isaac Keilon in 1913
• – Dawson (Dorcy) Jordan (1892-1977), sharecropper

• Dawson (Dorcy) Jordan m. Clemwood (Clemmie) Burns (1890-1916) in Pender, North Carolina in 1914; rem.  Ethel Lane (b. 1897) in 1927.
• – William Edward Jordan (1915-1990)

• William Edward Jordan m. Rosa Bell Hand (1920-1988) in Pender, North Carolina in 1937
• – Mary Alice (Allene) Jordan (1935-1962)
• – James Raymond Jordan (1936-1993)
• – Gene Edward Jordan (1941-2015)

• James R. Jordan (murdered in 1993) m. Deloris Peoples (b. 1941) in Virginia in 1957
• – James (Ronnie) Jordan (b. 1957 in Virginia), US Army commander
• – Deloris Jordan (b. 1959 in Virginia), motivational speaker
• – Larry Jordan (b. 1962 in North Carolina), basketball player
• – Michael Jordan (b. 1963 in Brooklyn), basketball star
• – Roslyn Jordan (b. 1964 in North Carolina), children’s author