January 30, 1951 – February 24, 2026
My beloved friend and Gather at the Table co-author, Sharon Leslie Morgan, has joined the ancestors. I was not expecting this. We talk regularly. We last spoke on her birthday just three weeks ago. She had survived breast cancer, was continuing to work on her next book about her great, great grandmother, Betty Warfe, and she bragged to me about her wonderful grandchildren, Violet and Julian, and I bragged about mine. She told me she was feeling a little “off” but otherwise life was good. Just a couple weeks earlier, on January 8, she’d had a powerful article published in the Mississippi Free Press: “I Have Chosen to Die in Mississippi.”
How ironic it felt after that article was published to then receive a message on Saturday, February 21 from Sharon’s son Vincent asking me to call him. She had fallen and Vincent had flown from his home in New York to her home in Mississippi to be with his mom and help her however he could. He took her to the hospital where tests confirmed that Sharon had a very aggressive Stage 4 cancer that had spread throughout her internal organs and was inoperable. Her remaining time was likely going to be brief. What a blessing that Vincent was with her. The medical professionals were doing their best to ensure she was stabilized and pain free. Sharon soon entered hospice care.
Sharon’s and my unlikely friendship began in 2008. We met at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia where we were both enrolled in a weeklong Summer Peacebuilding Institute class focused on Coming to the Table and its approach to racial healing and transformation. We met that week but didn’t really connect. A few months later, I was speaking at the University of Chicago in her hometown. Though she had other plans that night, she came to the school simply to give me a hug and welcome me to Chicago. Our friendship blossomed from there and grew into something neither of us expected. A “kumbaya” white man from rural Oregon and a “tough as nails” black woman from Southside Chicago teamed up to travel the United States and the Caribbean to visit sites of racial terror and trauma and sites of racial healing, to meet each other’s families and friends, to “live” the Coming to the Table Approach to racial healing together and to write our book, Gather at the Table, which was published by Beacon Press in 2012. We then embarked on a book tour that found us driving around 1,000 miles all around the east coast and another 1,000 miles on the west coast to share our story at colleges, churches, bookstores and other venues, including Monticello. My wife Lindi traveled with us to Tobago during the writing phase and supported us during the book tour. Lindi and Sharon also became fast friends. My favorite photo from our travels is of Sharon and Lindi, two grandmothers, sitting side by side, crocheting gifts for their grandchildren while we waited for someone to unlock the doors to the venue where Sharon and I would be presenting that evening at the University of Baltimore.
Sharon and I became deeply involved in Coming to the Table. She came up with the acronym for the “Table” in Coming to the Table: Taking America Beyond the Legacy of Enslavement. Her expertise in genealogy (Sharon is the founder of Our Black Ancestry) helped many members searching for their own family history and connections. We eventually figured out our own circuitous connection: my grandfather’s 8th cousin’s wife’s great grandfather’s 3rd cousin married John Lewis Gavin, Jr., whose 1st cousin once removed had 17 children with Bettie Warfe, Sharon’s 2x great grandmother, who was enslaved by the Gavins. Yeah, quite circuitous.
Sharon and I became such close friends. We dealt honestly with each about anything and everything, food, music, movies, politics, and especially around the ongoing scourge of racism. We argued at times, drove each other a little mad occasionally, and we always worked through our differences. Our senses of humor were similar and quite, well, crude at times. Some of the joking we did would definitely shock folks and we kept that between us. We met each other’s families and friends. We talked about our grandchildren (she is Shama to hers, I’m Papa to mine). We stayed in each other’s homes. We cooked for each other (though we both owned restaurants in the past, she was the far more talented chef!). We laughed and cried together. And we loved each other deeply and genuinely. We did our best to model what we wrote about. We trust that our book, our other writing and public speaking, had a positive impact on people in the deeply challenging times in which we live.
I learned of Sharon’s passing in a text from Vincent while at my granddaughter’s high school basketball game. Tears began to flow and I walked outside to look up at the stars and the moon; to feel Sharon’s presence on the other side of the veil. I spoke to her. “I will miss our phone calls and our hugs. I’ll miss laughing together. The world will be a very different place without you in it, Sharon. Ya done good. Real good! Rest in power, my friend. I love you.”
