The author, Steve Bailey, is outreach coordinator at the Anson County Historical Society.
Did you know that basketball legend Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s mother, Cora Douglas, was born in Ansonville?
Jabbar, originally named Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr., was born in New York City in 1947. His mother, Cora Douglas, was born 1918. The Douglas family was originally from the Cason Old Field Community of Morven Township in Anson County, but around 1910 the family moved to a “sharecropping” farm in Ansonville. By the 1930s the family had moved back to Morven, or Cason Old Field, so Jabbar is close kin to the Kersey and Douglas families of the Sandy Ridge Church and Streater Grove Church communities of Cason Old Field.
Jabbar’s earliest known ancestor was his great-great-grandfather who was a slave named Barnes born about 1799 possibly in Anson County. Barnes lived his remaining years at the old James C. Bennett Plantation on Diggs Road where he passed away in 1849 and was buried in the slave cemetery on the property. The James C. Bennett Plantation was built about 1833 and when Stephen Spielberg visited Wadesboro in May of 1985, he fell in love with the old home there and decided to feature it in his movie “The Color Purple” in July 1985.
About 2003 Jabbar’s girlfriend in California hired me to work on his family history. At the time, she didn’t tell me that it was for him. She only stated that she was having this done for her boyfriend as a surprise. Several weeks later a distant cousin of his who lives in Morven Township saw me and mentioned the girlfriend’s name and told me I was researching Jabbar’s ancestry.
In 2007 a producer of the TV series “Who Do You Think You Are” contacted me about researching Jabbar’s family history for a future episode of the show. I remember those phone conversations and email messages took place two days before Thanksgiving. I told them to contact Jabbar’s girlfriend about the family history I had collected for her. I told them that Jabbar’s ancestry was made up of poor sharecropping families.
The producers were in search of something spectacular in Jabbar’s family history and it just wasn’t there. I never heard from them again nor do I know if his family history made it on the program.