George Jefferson

George Jefferson is a fictional character played by Sherman Hemsley on the American television sitcoms All in the Family (1973–1975, 1978) and its spin-off The Jeffersons (1975–1985), in which he serves as the program's protagonist. He has appeared in all 253 episodes of The Jeffersons. 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. 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 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. He began dating Louise when they were teenagers and married her upon his discharge from the navy in 1951; by 1979 they had been married 28 years. Before the Jeffersons' store opening, the family lived in a derelict section of Harlem. George had worked as a janitor at the "Hempstead Apartments", and Louise as a housekeeper. In the third episode of All in the Family "My Aching Back", Lionel Jefferson explained that his father was able to open his cleaning store with a $3,200 ($21,467.34 in 2021) settlement after being rear-ended by a bus. Although this is later contradicted in a Season Six episode of The Jeffersons, "The First Store". George's brother Henry Jefferson, played by veteran character actor Mel Stewart, 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 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 as a result, Henry Jefferson never appeared on The Jeffersons. Henry's absence was attributed to his family's move to Chicago, 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.