Gracing the Table (GTT) has been meeting for over a year now, and while we have not yet brought to the conference table two families on different sides of the racial divide, lots of activity in that direction has occurred. In addition to our monthly meetings in which discussion of race has remained on the table, in May, as a final activity for our program year, Attorney David Person, Professor Ali
sea McLeod, and student Naomi Rahn visited the homes of two Holly Springs families—Mary Walker Gatewood and Mr. Conversation with the two families, which lasted over an hour each, included discussion of family history, as well as the road toward civil rights in Holly Springs. As it turns out, Professor McLeod, co-facilitator of GTT with Attorney Person, is indirectly connected to both families. Marie McClatchy, a Nelms through her mother, is related to Mollie Nelms Crump, mother of former mayor of Memphis Edward Hull Crump. McLeod’s own ancestors, Daniel and Nancy Williams, were slaves of the Hull family. Mollie Crump lived for a time at the Hull family’s Lodge residence in Hudsonville, believed to be the earliest home of the Hulls. Coincidentally, McLeod’s husband’s maternal family also was with a white family with roots in Hudsonville—the Gatewoods. The grandmother of McLeod’s husband, Magdalene Cunningham Brown, spent most of her life in Memphis but came of age in Slayden after marrying. Her mother, Katie Gatewood, was likely owned by Thomas G. Gatewood, ancestor of Mary Walker. Slavery wove a tangled web, and part of the work of GTT in the past year has been to untangle the web and create an atmosphere in which persons living today with different legacies relative to the institution of bondage can meet and have civil conversation. McLeod is not dubious about the opportunity to meet descendants of slave owners or about the value of doing so. Committed to the idea that the time is now for such meetings to occur, she hopes that in the 2013-2014 program year families will voluntarily come forward to share in a private setting their different backgrounds. McLeod, whose paternal family migrated to Detroit from Mississippi in the 1940s, was actually born in Michigan but attended school in Alabama (Stillman College), where she and her husband Carter met. Since discovering that the two share a Marshall County history, she has been all the more convinced that people living today must search out points of connection. In fact, she has said that since undertaking the work of GTT she has been barraged by people with surnames connected to the Gatewoods; several current Rust College students for instance—both from Mississippi and beyond—carry the surname. As a teacher of writing and a lay historian, part of her task has become the kind of reunion that GTT can make happen.
