Little Richard shatter racial divisions in the music industry. Little Richard was born Richard Wayne Penniman on December 5, 1932, in Macon, Georgia. He was the third of twelve children of Leva Mae (née Stewart) and Charles "Bud" Penniman. His father was a church deacon who sold bootlegged moonshine on the side and owned a nightclub, the Tip In Inn. His mother was a member of Macon's New Hope Baptist Church. Initially, Little Richard's first name was supposed to have been "Ricardo" but an error resulted in "Richard" instead. The Penniman children were raised in a neighborhood of Macon called Pleasant Hill.
Penniman, Virginia Thornton: "Penniman: Virginia's Own Ghost City," (Portsmouth, VA: Gentle Beam Publications). Penniman, Virginia Penniman was an unincorporated town in northwestern York County, Virginia, on the south bank of the York River northeast of Williamsburg. This was on the Virginia Peninsula and near the Hampton Roads region of southeastern Virginia in the United States. A plant and company town were developed by E.I. DuPont Nemours company originally to manufacture TNT. It was named for Russell Sylvanus Penniman, an American chemist who in 1885 invented ammonia dynamite. As part of the World War I war efforts, Penniman was converted to other use