Kathleen Jordan, editor of her father Hamilton Jordan’s memoir, “A Boy from Georgia: Coming of Age in the Segregated South,” will speak about the book at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 16, at the Carter Presidential Library & Museum Lobby. Also on hand will be Hamilton Jordan’s lifelong friend Jay Beck. Free and open to the public.
441 Freedom Parkway Atlanta; www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/events/ 404-865-7100
Kathleen Jordan will confess that completing your father’s uncompleted memoir is like treading through a minefield.
Jordan, 27, is the daughter of Hamilton Jordan, the engineer of Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential win. She will speak about her father’s memoir, “A Boy from Georgia,” on Friday, Oct. 16, at the Carter Presidential Library.
Her father worked on the book for more than 10 years, but it was still incomplete when he died of a cancer recurrence in 2008.
Jordan’s children and his widow took up the task of editing it and seeing it through to publication. It was a painful, beautiful experience, said Kathleen, who took the lead role as author. Grief would boil up as she read about this ungainly boy, stumping through his awkward Albany childhood in his leg braces, and she found herself still coping with his death. But joy would often follow.
“It was lovely in a lot of ways,” said the daughter, a writer of television scripts who lives in Los Angeles: “to be able to re-know my father, in a completely different” way.
Her father had previously written books about his time heading the Carter cabinet (“Crisis”) and about facing down cancer (“No Such Thing as a Bad Day”) but this tale was more difficult, the story of a young man waking to the fact that his family is on the wrong side of history.
“This book is different,” said Kathleen. “It took his whole life for him to formulate his perspective.”
Jordan's family, including his widow, Dorothy Henry, and his children, Hamilton, Kathleen and Alex, spoke about completing the book in a recent YouTube video.
Hamilton Jordan came from a politically connected family. His maternal grandfather, Hamp McWhorter, was president of the Georgia State Senate, and his cousin was the state Supreme Court’s chief justice.
But his family was invested in the segregated status quo and kept as a family secret the fact that Hamp’s wife, Helen Gottheimer McWhorter, was Jewish. Young Hamilton didn’t learn that truth until his grandmother was buried among her Jewish relatives.
“The ideas that were so prevalent (then) are so foreign to me,” said Kathleen Jordan. “Just the shame of having any Jewish heritage: I can’t on any personal level understand that.”
At the same time, she points out that in the era of the Leo Frank lynching, Hamp McWhorter knew he was sacrificing his political aspirations to marry the woman he loved. Another family member, Hamilton’s uncle Clarence Jordan, a farmer and a New Testament Greek scholar, was the founder of Koinonia, a racially-integrated community in Southwest Georgia that was the target of hate crimes.
Clarence Jordan was rarely discussed around the Hamilton Jordan household.
Jordan’s ambivalence about his upbringing is embodied in the book’s cover image of the young boy holding a Confederate flag. “It’s the perfect image for the cover of this book,” said Kathleen. “This book is about learning what it means — it is about the journey to understand that simple moment in which he’s so blissfully unaware of the weight of the thing that he holds in his hand.”
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