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George Jefferson
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George Jefferson is a fictional character played by Sherman Hemsley in American television sitcoms All in the Family (from 1973 until 1975) and its spin-off The Jeffersons (1975-1985).
Character overview
George Jefferson was born in Harlem in 1929, an ambitious African American entrepreneur who started and managed a successful chain of seven dry cleaning stores in New York City called Jefferson Cleaners. The only background on the Jefferson family is that they were Alabama sharecroppers.
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Encyclopedia
George Jefferson is a fictional character played by Sherman Hemsley in American television sitcoms All in the Family (from 1973 until 1975) and its spin-off The Jeffersons (1975-1985).
Character overview
George Jefferson was born in Harlem in 1929, an ambitious African American entrepreneur who started and managed a successful chain of seven dry cleaning stores in New York City called Jefferson Cleaners. The only background on the Jefferson family is that they were Alabama sharecroppers. In a very early episode, George's wife Louise makes mention of a conversation she had with George's father after she and George were married. However, the show's writers later applied a retroactive change in the continuity of George's father, such that he had died when George was 10 years old. This left George to take care of his mother; therefore, George was unable to complete high school. He was a cook in the US Navy during the Korean War and also worked as a janitor. He met and began dating Louise when they were teenagers, and he married her upon his discharge from the navy.
George has a brother named Henry, portrayed by Mel Stewart on All in the Family. However, that character was created only because at the time of his introduction, Sherman Hemsley was starring in the Broadway musical Purlie and not yet available to take on the part of George. All in the Family creator Norman Lear, however, was set on Hemsley in the role of George, so he created the Henry Jefferson character to act as a surrogate for what otherwise would have been the George Jefferson character in the All in the Family scripts. Once Hemsley became available and joined the cast, the character of his brother became extraneous, and a result, Henry Jefferson never appeared on The Jeffersons.
On All in the Family, Jefferson lived in a working-class neighborhood in the borough of Queens, next door to the Bunker family, with his wife Louise (Isabel Sanford) and son Lionel (Mike Evans). During the period, between 1971 and 1973, when the Henry Jefferson character was filling in as the on-screen Jefferson patriarch, George remained a frequently mentioned offscreen character. His perpetual absence was explained within the story as being a result of his refusal to set foot in his bigoted neighbor Archie Bunker's home. When the spin-off series The Jeffersons began in January 1975, George and his family had moved to a luxury apartment in a high-rise building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, or as the theme song described it, "a deluxe apartment in the sky."
Like his neighbor Archie Bunker, George Jefferson was frequently opinionated, rude, bigoted, prone to scheming and not particularly intelligent in a scholastic sense. Unlike Archie, however, George was more quick-thinking, and usually more clever. Frequently, plots in The Jeffersons revolved around George's schemes, often involving some level of dishonesty, to obtain things he wanted. These attempts more often than not ended in comedic failure. In one farcical episode, George schemes to obtain a new client (a mixed-race couple) by inviting them and the Willises (also a mixed-race couple) to dinner. When the Willises realize that George is using them, they leave before the new client shows up. This makes George bribe Florence the maid and Ralph the doorman into pretending to be the Willises. Eventually the Willises return, and by pretending to be Florence and Ralph, they help George land the client, while trapping George into throwing them an extravagant anniversary party.
In another similarity to Archie Bunker, George Jefferson's personality softened somewhat as years passed. By The Jeffersons series finale in 1985, the frequent racism and interracial marriage plotlines of early seasons were replaced with plots involving the Jeffersons' family life, as well as interactions with maid Florence (played by Marla Gibbs) and neighbors.
Jefferson Cleaners
The third episode of All in the Family explained how George Jefferson acquired his dry-cleaning business. In that episode, George Jefferson's son Lionel explains that the family had been involved in a car accident, and used the insurance money, thirty-two-hundred dollars ($3,200) to start up Jefferson’s Cleaners. A Christmas flashback episode, which featured Sherman Hemsley playing his character's father, explained how he got the idea to open a dry cleaning business as child after his father told him that dry cleaning was expensive. This episode also showed how George had been involved in money-making schemes since childhood, with him working as a shoe-shine boy then paying a schoolmate to push people into mud puddles, forcing them to get their shoes shined.
Before the Jeffersons' store opening, George had worked as a janitor, and Louise as a housekeeper. The family lived in a derelict section of Harlem. After the store opening, they moved to Queens. However, as depicted in a "flashback" episode which aired during one of The Jeffersons later seasons, their grand opening was overshadowed by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. This marked a continuity lapse, as Dr. King's assassination occurred in 1968, and the All in the Family episode in which the Jeffersons were said to have just opened the business aired in 1971.)
George's former janitorial job had the effect of referring to all men who did cleaning work as janitors. When Louise says that the building's white janitor was properly referred to as a "cleaning technician", George says: "Well, whenever a man of our race has that job he is a janitor!"
George Jefferson’s chief business rival was Gil Cunningham, with whom George had a considerable antagonistic relationship. Later in the series, after Gil Cunningham died, the Jeffersons discovered that Gil never desired to be enemies with George. It was revealed that Gil's wife (played by future L.A. Law star Susan Ruttan), had been the motivator behind this competition all along. In his will, Gil left George the bowling trophy he won vs. Jefferson Cleaners, with a letter inside which warned: “she put the ‘cunning’ in Cunningham.” and also advised George to never trust her.
Although not often mentioned, George and Louise had a niece living in Chicago; nurse Julie Williams, played by actress Lynne Moody, who also played Jenny in the Jeffersons pilot. It was presumed that Julie was from Louise's side of the family, but that was not ever explored.
Cultural impact
The lingering cultural impact of the George Jefferson character is such that Michelle Obama, the wife of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, referenced George Jefferson in a June 2008 interview with the New York Times. Referring to an unfounded rumor discussed by a blogger that she had once used the word "whitey" in a speech, Michelle Obama told the Times: "You are amazed sometimes at how deep the lies can be . . . I mean, ‘whitey’? That’s something that George Jefferson would say. Anyone who says that doesn’t know me. They don’t know the life I’ve lived. They don’t know anything about me."
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