Katherine Jackson wasn’t planning on having a baby that day. She was out for a drive around Gary, Indiana, with her neighbor. The two women were going to take a look at something new in town.
“My water broke while my neighbor Mildred White and I were driving over to see the new grammar school under construction, Garnett Elementary,” Katherine wrote in her 1990 book, “My Family, The Jacksons.”
Mildred kept her cool. “Girl, don’t worry about it,” she said. Then she turned the car around and took Katherine home.
That half-built school would become Michael’s school in Gary. He later wrote about singing “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” at a school program in the first grade. But that day it was still a building site, and the boy who’d one day walk its halls hadn’t even arrived yet.
His big brothers have told plenty of stories about growing up in that little Indiana town, and this TV sit-down is a warm chance to hear them say it in their own words.
The Jackson brothers talk about growing up in Gary
Back at the house, Katherine called her mother, Martha. Martha and Katherine’s stepfather drove her to Mercy Hospital, and Michael Joseph Jackson was born later that night. It was August 29, 1958. He was the eighth of ten children for Katherine and her husband, Joe Jackson.
Katherine had started out a long way from Indiana. She was born Kattie B. Screws in Clayton, Alabama, in 1930. Now she was a mother again, holding her newest son for the first time.
“The two other things I remember about him as I held him in my arms for the first time were his big brown eyes and his long hands, which reminded me of my father-in-law’s,” she wrote.
That father-in-law was Joe’s dad, Samuel. He’s the same grandfather who “cried like a baby” when little Michael sang at school.
Then came the big question every new baby brings with him. What do we call him?
Grandma Martha wanted that job. And she had more than one idea.
Here’s how Katherine told it in the book: “‘I want to name him,’ my mother said. I hated her first suggestion: Ronald. ‘How about Roy, then?’ ‘Oh, my gosh, Mama, no.’ She thought for a little while. ‘I’ve got it, Michael.’ ‘That’s it,’ I said.”
So the future King of Pop came very close to being Ronald Jackson. Or Roy Jackson! Katherine said no to both, and it took her mother one more try to find the name the whole world would learn.
Michael grew up in a tiny house at 2300 Jackson Street, and members of the family have gone back to see it. Watch them tour the place where it all began, with Michael’s son Prince praising his uncles.
The Jackson family back at the house in Gary
If you’ve never seen the street, this walk around the house and the neighborhood shows just how small the world was that Michael started out in.
A street-level tour of Michael’s old neighborhood
Katherine’s book came out in November 1990, and the naming story sits right there in her chapter about that night.
What gets us is how ordinary it is. Grandma Martha wanted to give the baby something of her own, and Katherine wasn’t shy about telling her mother when she’d missed. They kept going until they both liked the answer, the way families still do in hospital rooms everywhere.