Clinton Administrations - Early Life
Early Life
William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton was born in Hope, Arkansas, on August 19, 1946. Clinton's mother, Virginia Kelley, named him after his father, William Jefferson Blythe IV, who was killed in an automobile accident several months before young Clinton's birth. When the boy was four years old, he went to live with his maternal grandparents, Harkey and Mattie Hawkins, while his mother trained to become a nurse-anesthetist in New Orleans. His grandparents ran a small grocery store in a predominantly African American neighborhood outside Hope. Despite the racism that pervaded the U.S. South in the early 1950s, Clinton's grandparents treated their customers with respect and dignity, and impressed upon the future president the idea that segregation was wrong.
When Clinton was eight, his mother married Roger Clinton, a car salesman, and the family moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to a house that had no indoor plumbing....
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