All in the Family TV show Wiki
Register
Advertisement
George Jefferson
George Weezie AITF
George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) and wife Louise (Isabel Sanford) in scene from the episode "Pay the Twenty Dollars" in 1974.
Personal Information
Title: George Jefferson
Gender: Male
Occupation/
Career:
Half-owner and President of Jefferson Cleaners with wife Louise
Housewife
Philanthropist
Character
description:
Nemesis of Archie Bunker
Friend to Mike and Gloria Stivic and Edith Bunker
Related to: Louise Jefferson (wife)
Lionel Jefferson (son)
Jenny Willis Jefferson (daughter-in-law)
Henry Jefferson (brother)
Olivia Jefferson (mother)
Character information
Appeared on: All in the Family
The Jeffersons
Episodes appeared in: 14 episodes over 2 seasons, 1971-1975 and guest appearance in Season 8 (1978)
Character played by: Sherman Hemsley
Small flag infobox wordmark

George Jefferson was a local dry cleaner, owner of Jefferson Cleaners, the husband of Louise Jefferson (Edith's best friend) and the Bunkers' next door neighbor in the early episodes of All in the Family, and chief nemesis of Archie in seasons 4-5. Introduced to television audiences in the series fourth season in the episode titled "Henry's Farewell", and played by theatre actor Sherman Hemsley, George and the rest of the Jeffersons, with the exception of Henry, were spun-off into a new series during the 1974-75 season titled The Jeffersons, which itself would enjoy a long run on CBS, lasting for eleven seasons.

Character Overview[]

George Jefferson was born in Harlem in 1930, an ambitious African-American entrepreneur who started and managed a successful chain of seven dry cleaning stores in New York City. 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 about the Jeffersons' family roots.

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 9 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 United States Navy during the Korean War. He began dating Louise when they were teenagers, and then married her upon his discharge from the navy.

Before the Jeffersons' store opening, the family lived in a derelict section of Harlem. George had worked as a janitor, and Louise as a housekeeper. In one episode Louise says that the building's white janitor was properly referred to as a "custodian". George says: "Well, whenever a man of our race has that job, he is a janitor!" The third episode of All in the Family explained how George Jefferson started his dry-cleaning business. George Jefferson's son Lionel explains that the family used a $3,200 (around $19797.00, adjusted for current inflation) insurance settlement from a car accident to start Jefferson's Cleaners.

In the Season 1 The Jeffersons episode "Meet the Press" (episode #9, 3/15/75), it's indicated that it was a $5,000 ($22,658.89 in 2016) whiplash settlement from the City of New York. 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 a child after his father told him that dry cleaning was expensive.[1] This episode also showed how George had been involved in money-making schemes since childhood, with him working as a shoe-shine boy and paying a schoolmate to push people into mud puddles, forcing them to get their shoes shined.

He started his opening his business in 1968 in Harlem, earned enough money for three years to move into the suburbs of a working-class neighborhood of Queens in 1971. Over the two years George made enough money to start a chain of dry cleaning stores with locations in Manhattan as well as Queens. With that, George and Louise have enough money to move on up from Queens to Manhattan and left Queens in style with a limousine in an episode in All in the Family Season 5 to a deluxe penthouse apartment and live the life of luxury.

George's brother Henry appeared in All in the Family during the lead-up to the spin-off of The Jeffersons. That character was created only because Sherman Hemsley was starring in the Broadway theatre musical Purlie and not yet available to take on the part of George. 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. Henry's absence was attributed to his family's move to Chicago, Illinois, but was mentioned one time when he had a son named Raymond (played by Gary Coleman), who came to visit his aunt Louise and uncle George in one episode of The Jeffersons.

During 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, George's perpetual absence was explained as being a result of his refusal to set foot in his bigoted neighbor Archie Bunker's home, of Jefferson's own anti-white prejudice.  In later episodes, however, relationships between Jefferson and Bunker thawed somewhat. When the spin-off series The Jeffersons began in January 1975, George and his family had moved "to a deluxe apartment in the sky" on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

All in the Family Appearances[]

The following is a list of All in the Family episodes featuring George Jefferson before and during The Jeffersons.

Season 4[]

Season 5[]

Season 8[]

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."[2]

Notes[]

  • George and Louise moved into Queens in the Bunker's neighborhood when they made enough money when they opened their first dry cleaner store.
  • George opened the first store when he got enough money to buy his first store from the car insurance that he got from a car wreck. He opened the first store in Harlem in 1968.

References[]

  1. All in the Family - Archie's Aching Back.
  2. Michael Powell and Jodi Kantor. "Michelle Obama Looks for a New Introduction", New York Times, 2008-06-18. Retrieved on 2008-06-18. 

External Links[]

Advertisement