Pat Russell, Psy. D., has had over 20 years of multi-cultural and community based experience, ranging from teaching to family therapy and community based advocacy. Among her areas of expertise are working therapeutically with diverse individuals and communities to heal past traumas, cultural and anti-bias education, family therapy, substance abuse awareness and counseling, and youth and family services. Her past research was centered on her own family’s psychological & behavioral attributes to slavery.
Photo by Laurie Rhodes
Susan Hutchison is a descendant of Thomas Jefferson and many other southern slaveholders. She co-founded and is currently the Community Coordinator for Coming to the Table. In recent years Susan discovered and researched a Mississippi slaveholding ancestor, found African American cousins related through him, then in August 2010 attended their family reunion in Mississippi. She is co-authoring a writing project focusing on the stories of descendants of slaveholders. Susan leads groups on listening and emotional healing, and lives in Seattle with her husband and son.
Photo by Jerry Dean Pettitz
Ann Holmes Redding, PhD, was born while her father was presenting closing arguments for a case that led to Brown vs. Board of Education. A descendant of enslaved Africans and slaveholding European Americans as well, Ann has taught African American history and culture at the high school and college levels and was a curator at the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston. She has served as a consultant in anti-racism and multi-cultural work in professional and volunteer capacities and as part of her vocation as a Christian minister. In 2009, she founded Abrahamic Reunion West, a non-profit working to heal the global dysfunction of the Abrahamic family of faith.
Photo by Tom DeWolf
Mary Heyward Douglass is the seventh great-granddaughter of Nathaniel Heyward, a South Carolina rice planter who was one of the largest slaveholders (if not the largest) in the United States. At his death in 1851, his estate inventory included 2,350 slaves and 17 rice plantations. Mary is in the process of identifying slave names from family memoirs, plantation records and wills/estates. Her immediate goal is to post a “names” database online in hopes that it may help African Americans who are doing family research. In her work life, Mary is a reference librarian and responds to questions related to history, genealogy and maps.
Patricia Moncure Thomas maintains a Moncure family website and has written a book entitled Moncure Place…Connecting Family and Friends which contains stories, interviews, photos, family trees, and history of the times and places in which her Moncure family lived. She is President of the Black Historical Society of Kitsap, Inc. Her goal is to uncover and document untold stories about the legacy of slavery that have been left out of our United States history–stories, she says, that connect everyone as important parts of American history. Pat attended the pilot Coming to the Table (CTTT) event in 2006 with a white Moncure descendant, and is now a member of the CTTT Community Practice Board. She is the principal of Browns Point Elementary in Tacoma, WA.
Photo by Tom DeWolf
Elly Hale was born and raised in the Western US, but as she discovered in 2000, her family’s east coast history included a major role in the North American slave trade. Invited by a distant cousin to explore this history and its present day legacy, Elly and her cousins were filmed in Ghana, Cuba, and Rhode Island, where the DeWolfs completed the rum triangle. Traces of the Trade screened at Sundance Film Festival, and Elly has led discussions about white privilege at numerous Seattle screenings. She welcomes this opportunity to rejoin the work to connect past and present in hopes of a better future.