Kanye West aka Ye Family History

Overview

Kanye Omari West, known also since 2021 as the hip-hop rapper Ye, was born on June 8th, 1977 to Ray and Donda West in Atlanta, Georgia.

When he was three, his parents divorced and Kanye moved with his mother to Chicago.  He grew up in suburban Oak Lawn.  In 1997 he enrolled at Chicago State University to study English.  But he soon dropped out to pursue a music career.  This greatly displeased his mother, a professor at the university, although she would later accept the decision.

His Hip-Hop Music.  Kanye started off as a producer for local hip-hop bands in the Chicago area.  By 2000 he had become a recognized producer in his field.  He has often been credited with revitalizing Jay-Z’s career with his extensive contributions to the 2001 album The Blueprint.  Rolling Stone has ranked this album as one of the greatest hip-hop albums.

Kanye’s first album, The College Dropout, appeared in 2004 and was a massive hit, going triple platinum.  Other hits followed.  His style could be said to include intricate hip-hop beats, topical subject matter, and some clumsy rapping laced with inventive wordplay.

He has projected a bad boy image.  For instance, when Taylor Swift was accepting her award for Best Female Video in 2009, Kanye unannounced went on stage with her.  He grabbed the microphone to proclaim that Beyoncé deserved the award instead.  Watching the show, President Barack Obama called him a jackass.

Overall, he has generally been an outspoken and controversial celebrity throughout his career.  He has received criticism from the mainstream media and also from industry colleagues and entertainers.

The other celebrity factor about him has been his marriage to the TV reality star Kim Kardashian in 2014.  They had four children during their eight years together.  After their divorce, Kim said the following about him:  “He is a brilliant but complicated person who, on top of the pressure of being an artist, has had to deal with the pressure and isolation heightened by his bipolar disorder.”

Kanye’s life and career was covered in a 2022 Netflix documentary Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy.

Kanye aka Ye – His Father’s Side

The Young Ray West.  Kanye’s father was born in 1949 in Tucson, Arizona, the second son of James and Fannie West.  His father had been a Master Sergeant in the Air Force, serving during World War Two and in Korea and Vietnam.  On retirement in 1966, he worked in the Post Office in Tucson for the next twenty years.  All in all, this was hardly a radicalizing home life for the young Ray West.

But radicalized he was.  It was the sixties.  He was for a time a member of the Black Panther party founded by Huey Newton in Oakland in 1966.

He then turned up in Atlanta and was one of the first black photo-journalists on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper.  He was proud of the photo portraits he did of Ronald Reagan, Rev. Ralph Abernathy and Maya Angelou.  In Atlanta he met and married Donda Williams.  Their son Kanye was born in 1977.

The Older Ray West.  After Ray and Donda divorced in 1980 and Donda and Kanye departed for Chicago, Ray would see Kanye in Atlanta in the summers.  Their relationship remained amicable, although he had really become an absent father.  But wind the clock forward to 2019 and Kanye would say: “It took me forty-two years to realize that my Dad was my best friend.”

Ray had by that time gone through further divorces and survived a cancer scare.  He was at one time a Christian counselor and had embarked on a number of schemes.  He later created, with startup capital provided by his son, .the Good Water foundation in the Dominican Republic and spent time there.

Kanye aka Ye – His Mother’s Side

John and Clara Williams were from Texas, possibly El Paso.  They were about thirty when they migrated to Oklahoma City around 1910.  At that time Oklahoma City was divided by race and they raised their children in the black section in the flats across the tracks.

John abandoned the family in 1924, leaving $0.25 to each of his children.  He never showed up again and died in California sometime in the 1930’s.  Clara was left to bring up the brood.

Portwood Williams.  Her son Portwood, just nine when his father left, recalled that he could survive by scavenging for bits and pieces with his sack in the back alleys.  He then graduated to shoeshine boy.

He later called himself a businessman.  He did enough to support his family.  He and his wife Lucille raised four children; and they were proud of what they had achieved as blacks in Oklahoma City.

Klaye Portice and Shirlie Ruth were the first blacks to perform on television there.  Portwood Williams Jr. graduated third in his class at Oklahoma University; and  Dr. Donda West was the first Black Chair of the English department at Chicago State University.

Portwood was active in the civil rights movement.  In 1958 he was the first driver to the civil rights sit-in at the Katz drugstore lunch counter in Oklahoma City.  His children Portwood Jr. and Donda were among the child protesters at that time.  Donda would later marvel at her father’s bravery.

On the third day of sit-ins, Katz staff served the protesting group their order. The Katz chain soon ended its segregation policy in all thirty-eight of its stores in four states.

Portwood and his wife were married for 72 years.  He died in 2013 at the age of 98.  Three years before he died he was recorded in a video where he reflected upon his life.

Kanye aka Ye – His Mother Donda

Donda’s Life.  Donda Williams, born in 1949, was Portwood’s youngest child but also the one who would go the furthest.  Her life took her along the academic route.

Having taken batchelor and doctoral degrees in English, she began her teaching career in the early 1970’s at Morris Brown College in Atlanta.  There she met Ray West and Kanye West was born.

In 1980, after the marriage broke up, Donda took Kanye with her to Chicago where she had accepted a teaching position at Chicago State University.  In all, she was to spend twenty-four years at CSU as the Head of its department of English, communications, media and theater.  Not bad for the girl from the wrong side of the track in Oklahoma City!

All the time she had been raising Kanye as a single mother.  In 1987, when Kanye was ten, she even took him to China for a year when she was teaching at Nanjung University.  Later, Kanye moved to California and broke in big time in the hip-hop rapper scene.  When she did retire in 2004, she moved to California to be with him and to support him.

Donda’s memoir written in 2007 was entitled Raising Kanye: Life Lessons from the Mother of a Hip-Hop Superstar.  She was indeed the backbone in Kanye’s life as he went on to write songs about her to express his gratitude.

Donda’s Death.  Donda West’s death on November 10, 2007 was sudden, tragic and unexpected.

After undergoing in hospital an operation for liposuction and breast reduction, Donda died the next day at her home in Playa del Rey at the age of fifty-eight.  Two months later the Los Angeles County coroner’s office would say that she had died of coronary artery disease and of multiple post-operative factors from cosmetic surgery.

Authorities in Los Angeles then launched an investigation into her death after learning that the doctor who operated on her had convictions for alcohol-related offenses and at least two major malpractice settlements.

The tragedy prompted California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to tighten cosmetic surgery laws with the Donda West Act.  This required that all cosmetic surgery patients receive prior medical clearance following a physical examination.

Kanye West aka Ye – His Family Tree

  • Oklahoma
  • John Williams from Texas (1879-1930’s) m. Clara Garland also from Texas (1877-1957) and moved to Oklahoma City around 1910.  John abandoned his family there in 1924.
  • – Ruby Lee Williams (b. 1913) m. Lawrence Ashwood
  • – Portwood Williams (1915-2013), active in civil rights
  • – Armeda Hicks nee Williams
  • Portwood Williams Sr. from Oklahoma City m. Lucille Eckles (1915-2008) in 1935
  • – Klaye Jones nee Williams (1938-2005)
  • – Shirlie Scoggins nee Williams (died in 2019) m. Vester Sullivan
  • – Portwood Williams Jr. (b. 1943) m. Beverly
  • – Donda Williams (1949-2007), mother of Kanye West
  • Arizona
  • James Frederick West from Delaware (1925-2006) m. Fannie Hooks from Arkansas (1928-2006) in 1946.  They lived in Tucson, Arizona and died within hours of each other.
  • – James West Jr. m. Yvonne Jones
  • – Raymond (Ray) West (b. 1949)
  • – Wanda West m. Charles Bodiford
  • – Jeannette West
  • – Sheila West m. Patrick McLaurin
  • – Wayne West m. Jolonda Barnett
  • Atlanta and Chicago
  • Dr. Donda Williams m. Ray West, photographer, in Atlanta in 1973, divorced in 1980.  Donda moved to Chicago with her son Kanye where she spent 24 years at Chicago State University,  She joined Kanye in California in 2004.  Ray rem. Cheryl Carmichael in 1997, divorced, and Brenda Bentley (b. 1960), separated.
  • – Kanye Omari West (b. 1977). Ray and Donda
  • – Aliya Jones (b. 1979), Ray and Cheryl
  • – Hal Carmichael, Ray and Cheryl
  • California
  • Kanye West aka Ye moved to California around 2002.  He m. Kim Kardashian (b. 1980) in Italy in 2014, divorced in 2022; rem. Bianca Censori from Australia (b.  1995) in 2023
  • – North West (b. 2013)
  • – Saint West (b. 2015)
  • – Chicago West (b. 2018)
  • – Psalm West (b. 2019)

 

 

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Written by Colin Shelley

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