Dr. Gretchen Maclachlan is the daughter of Margaret and Winston Ehrmann lived in New Haven, Connecticut, where he completed his Ph.D. at Yale University and she gave birth to me, Gretchen. In 1938 we came to Gainesville when the University of Florida hired him for the Sociology faculty. With World War II we located near Washington, D.C. where he prepared for intelligence duties in India and Burma.

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I could hardly wait to attend Washington School with my pals, but one was barred-Harriet was black. The knowledge of racism baffled and saddened me and began my questioning. Back in Gainesville, I got plenty of object lessons at my white-only school where I'd speak out, or rage. My parents supported me going to a woman's college in the North—Douglass College of Rutgers University, where for the first time, I attended a class with a black student. For graduate school my advisors recommend Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, which drew women and men from the world. As a teaching assistant in Statistics labs I trained a black man from Kentucky. In our shared office we bonded telling our stories: his segregation from whites and mine, from blacks.

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Well prepared as a Statistician, I worked in New York City at General Electric and later at Columbia University as a data analyst. After marrying homeboy Bruce Maclachlan and having our only child, Jessica, it seemed the right time to return to the South. The ferment of the civil rights movement brought us to Atlanta where the Southern Regional Council hired me to research racial issues. My major project, The Other Twenty Percent: A Statistical Analysis of Poverty in the South, attracted publicity and Dr. Vivian Henderson, President of historically-black Clark College. He hired me for the Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy where our research was directed to blacks, poor people, and the disadvantaged, concentrating on poverty, income inequality, employment, education, and voting rights.

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I began teaching Statistics to undergraduate students in the Social Sciences. We added a second Statistics course after the consolidation of Clark College and Atlanta University and my assignment to the Political Science Department. When granted my Ph.D. I taught full-time on a tenure-track, graduate students in addition to undergraduates. For twenty-six years Clark College/Clark Atlanta University, was my home, with colleagues and students, and black and white together.

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Retired, I'm writing a memoir in which our family history and public history are closely linked. Events, movements, and changes from the 1940s to century's end defined my family and my place in it and in the world.