Queer Places:
4493 Lindholm Rd, Victoria, BC V9C 4C5, Canada
Jefferson McRee
"Mac" Elrod (23 March 1932 – 16 June 2016) was a prominent librarian/cataloguer, who also served as a Methodist and Unitarian minister. He was involved in many social causes, notably the Civil Rights Movement and anti-war movements of the 1960s and the gay pride movement.
J. McRee Elrod worked in Korea, the United States, and Canada. He played a significant role in the creation of modern library practices in South Korea[1] and his innovations in card cataloguing were adopted widely in the pre-digital age.[1] He also pioneered a remote cataloguing service for special libraries. As a minister and social activist, Elrod's beliefs and values evolved from liberal Christian to Humanist. He volunteered his efforts in support of many liberal political causes, including universal medical care, a medical rather than a criminal approach to problems created by drug addiction, as well as racial and sexual orientation equity.[2]
Jefferson McRee Elrod, known all of his life as "Mac," was born in Gainesville, Georgia, on March 23, 1932, the only child of Angus Warren Elrod, a salesman, and Lona Mary McRee, a schoolteacher. He subsequently rejected the name "Jefferson" because of its association with Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America. His parents separated when he was eleven years old and he was raised by his mother, who worked as a bookkeeper and office manager. He and his mother survived the devastating Gainesville tornado tragedy of 1936. For his elementary and secondary education, he attended a special demonstration school created by the University of Georgia where student teachers could conduct their practicums. It was considered to be the best school in the area at a time when Georgia, a poor state, had two separate school systems, one for whites and one for blacks. As a child, his opposition to the Jim Crow laws and racism was awakened when he heard some of his schoolmates hurling racial taunts at black children. As he himself knew how it felt to be ostracized and ridiculed by taunts of "fatty," the young Mac Elrod felt empathy for the black children.[3] Elrod obtained his B.A. in History (magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) at the University of Georgia in June, 1952. He attended the George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, Tennessee as a Carnegie Fellow and obtained an M.A. in Information Technology in 1953.[4] He attended Scarritt College for Christian Workers, in Nashville, Tennessee and received a Master's in Theology in August, 1954. He later obtained a third master's degree in 1960, a Master of Science in Library Science (MLS), also from Peabody College. Elrod married Norma Lee Cummins, (born 1932), the daughter of William "Buck" Cummins and Mary Evelyn Dunn Cummins, of Vienna, Illinois, on June 4, 1953. They met at the 16th quadrennial Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions conference in Lawrence, Kansas in 1951 as delegates of their respective universities. They had six children, five surviving, including one mixed-race adopted daughter, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
In the late 1970s, Elrod came out as a gay man. After moving from Vancouver to Vancouver Island in 1990, he joined the Unitarian Church of Victoria, although not serving as a minister, and advocated for the congregation to be welcoming, initially to gays, subsequently to other diversities. He served on several national-level committees of the Canadian Unitarian Council (CUC), including as chair of the Equal Marriage Working Group. The president of the CUC reported in 2004, "Mac contributed an enormous amount of his time to this effort and without his generous financial support, and the pro bono work of our Counsel Robert J. Hughes and Kenneth W. Smith, the CUC could not have been one of 26 interveners who participated in the [2004] Canadian Supreme Court hearings [concerning same sex marriage]."[18][19]
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