How Chip Le Grand got his name

(Note: All links to The Age and Sydney Morning Herald articles in this piece are archived in accordance with the Nine newspaper journalists’ strike. Sign the petition to support the strike here.)

In the last few months, The Age chief reporter Chip Le Grand has written a great deal about Israel and Palestine.

I don’t want to explore Le Grand’s writing on Israel and Palestine in this article too deeply. I want to talk about his name.

But because Palestine is this newsletter’s primary focus, here’s a quick recap.

Earlier this month, author, lawyer and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah published an email from Le Grand in which he asked if she considers herself “an October 7 denier”. Abdel-Fattah called Le Grand’s questions “[an] obvious hit job masquerading as journalism” that were “calculated to stitch me up as a ‘Holocaust denier’,” and which were indicative of a “pattern of anti-Palestinian racism” across Australia’s largest media outlets.

Le Grand’s article published in The Age a day later, ‘The denial and disinformation facing October 7 survivors,’ repeated as fact many of the exhaustively discredited Israeli claims about Hamas brutality and mass sexual violence on October 7, while also equating criticism and interrogation of those claims with Holocaust denial. The article’s extensive falsehoods and distortions are detailed well here.

Le Grand also published an exclusive this month revealing that the Zionist Federation of Australia intended to lodge a complaint with the Australian Human Rights Commission against former SBS newsreader Mary Kostakidis. The ZFA claims that Kostakidis’ reposting of a link to a speech by Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah constitutes hate speech.

In an email published by Kostakidis, Le Grand agreed with the ZFA’s characterisation, writing that Kostakidis had “[promoted] hateful speech from the leader of a terrorist organisation”. For her part, Kostakidis noted that Le Grand, who published his exclusive a week before the ZFA filed their complaint, “is very well informed about what the Zionist lobby gets up to on a Sunday”.

In February, Le Grand wrote a front-page piece sympathetically profiling members of now-notorious WhatsApp groupchat ‘J.E.W.I.S.H Australian creatives and Academics’. That piece painted the January leaking of the groupchat’s transcript as “doxxing,” largely burying the fact that many members of that groupchat — including those who Le Grand profiled — were coordinating to have people fired or otherwise professionally censured for expressing support for Palestinians and a ceasefire in Gaza.

In Le Grand’s final story before Nine journalists went on strike this week — a recap of a soccer game between Israel and Mali at the Paris Olympics — he lauded the fact that there was “no attempt, either inside or outside the stadium, to turn this Olympic group match into something else”.

Anyway! Now onto the issue of real importance: Chip’s name.

Earlier this month I found out that Chip's birth name is Homer Eugene Le Grand, V.  I tweeted a dumb joke about it, largely riffing on the fact that Le Grand’s writing has often been sympathetic to transphobic agitators.

But Chip’s unusual name, and the fact that there were apparently four Homer Eugene Le Grands (Les Grand?) before the current one, piqued my interest. Who were they? Where did such a distinctive name come from? And why carry it down through the years?

I’m ashamed to say I spent far too much time finding the answers to these questions — but in fairness, the ancestral Homer Eugene Le Grands for whom Chip is named are a fascinating bunch. The bulk of this research was via ancestry resource FamilySearch, but was corroborated wherever possible with other sources. I sent questions to Le Grand on July 16 asking for confirmation of what I found, but did not hear back.

Chip’s father, Professor Homer Eugene Le Grand, Jr., PhD, was a decorated historian of science who moved to Melbourne with his young family from Blacksburg, Virginia in 1975. He would serve as the Dean of Arts at Monash University and the University of Melbourne. Monash’s Homer Le Grand Student Assistance Scholarship is named in his memory.

Chip’s grandfather, Homer Eugene “Gene” Le Grand, was born and spent most of his life in Shelby, North Carolina, where he worked at the Shelby Cotton Mill, the family concern. Gene’s father and Chip's great-grandfather, Richard "Dick" Torrance LeGrand Sr, was a longtime superintendent and eventual president of the mill, which would stay in the family until its sale in 1965.

Dick LeGrand’s father, Homer Eugene LeGrand, was the second family member of that name, about whom I could find little. Dick’s grandfather, however — Chip’s great-great-great grandfather — was the original Homer LeGrand. FamilySearch lists him as being born in Mangum, North Carolina in 1814, and dying in his hometown 50 years later. (For clarity’s sake, I’ll refer to this Homer from now on as Homer I.)

It’s not 100% clear if Homer I is the Private Homer LeGrand listed in the US National Park Service's Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System as having fought for the Confederacy’s 36th North Carolina regiment (also known as North Carolina’s 2nd Artillery or the “Cape Fear regiment”). It may be Homer I’s nephew, Homer V. LeGrand, who lived from 1844 to 1865.

Either one of them could be one of the several H. LeGrands with differing middle initials who are also listed as members of the 36th Regiment. A Private (later Lieutenant) Nash LeGrand who also fought in the 36th is likely another of Homer I’s nephews.

The LeGrands in the NPS records might be other LeGrand family members, LeGrands of no relation, or accidental duplicates or misspellings in Confederate records. One example of this uncertainty is whether Julian E. LeGrand, Homer I’s eldest son, is the Julius E. LeGrand listed as serving in the same regiment as Private Homer.

Besides their contribution to the Confederate war effort, other branches of the Le Grand/LeGrand family tree are also historically significant. As it turns out, the LeGrands were a prominent family in North Carolina commerce and politics in the 19th century.

An obituary of Chip’s great-great-great granduncle, Hampton Wade LeGrand, published in The Anson Times in 1885, described the LeGrands as “one of the most prominent and highly respected families in [North Carolina’s Anson] County”. According to his obituary, Chip’s great-great granduncle James Terry LeGrand, Sr. Esq. was a North Carolina state Senator for two non-consecutive terms in 1875 and 1889, a prominent lawyer and "a large planter”.

In 1824, Homer I’s sister Elizabeth married Thomas Little, a prominent North Carolina cotton planter and slaveholder. A National Register of Historic Places nomination form filed in 1984 noted that “by 1824, [Little] had acquired enough land and the social status to marry Ermin [sic] Elizabeth LeGrand, member of a wealthy Richmond County planter family”.

According to the Richmond County, NC Historical Society, “Thomas, with the help of his son John Phillips Little, became one of the region’s wealthiest cotton planters. His plantation contained 18 slave houses for his 69 slaves. The plantation had a store and a grist mill, the mill giving the community its name of Little’s Mill.”

While the plantation house, Carlisle, was destroyed by fire in 1963, a photo survives.

Thomas and Elizabeth’s younger son, Colonel Benjamin Franklin Little, would go on to become a Confederate officer with the 52nd North Carolina Infantry Regiment. After being captured by Federal soldiers in 1863 and having an arm amputated, Col. Little served as Richmond County’s delegate to the short-lived Confederate North Carolina General Assembly of 1864-65 and one of North Carolina’s delegates to the 1876 Democratic National Convention.

Col. Little also inherited Carlisle.

There is also a Homer Legrand Lyon, who served as a Democratic Congressman for North Carolina from 1921 to 1929. Despite the name, I wasn’t able to ascertain any familial connection between Lyon’s family — one of North Carolina’s leading planting and slaveholding families, according to NCPedia — and the LeGrands or the Littles.

None of this matters much in the scheme of things. Chip’s extended family history has nothing to do with what he writes about Israel and Palestine. His reporting speaks for itself.

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