Maya McFadden Photo
New Dixwell corner name is unveiled Saturday.
The late Bishop Lethenial McClam.
The “legacy, integrity, generosity, and love” of the Bishop Lethenial McClam will now live on forever at the corner of Bristol Street and Dixwell Avenue.
“Bishop Lethenial McClam Corner” was unveiled at that spot Saturday afternoon to the family, friends, and community members whom McClam helped throughout his lifetime through unspoken acts of kindness, prayer, and his establishing of the McClam Funeral Home more than 20 years ago.
McClam, who died in 2016, began his journey as an usher, choir member, and Sunday school teacher.
As the founder and owner of the McClam Funeral Home at 95 Dixwell Ave., McClam dedicated himself to helping his community at the darkest moments in their life and gave them a sense of hope after losing a loved one.
Saturday’s gathering.
McClam left the family business to his children Sheena, Shawneeque, Darrell, and Darnell McClam.
Rev. Boise Kimber, who met Bishop 37 years ago, described him as having a “business mind” with a goal of passing a legacy of service and entrepreneurship to his kids.
Rev. Boise Kimber: “He was a helper and he loved people.”
“Your daddy was an example. Your daddy walked up right. You never heard a scandal about your daddy. Your daddy lived for God and he lived for people,” Kimber said to the children at Saturday’s ceremony.
Lessons From Dad
Darnell, Sheena, Shawneeque, and Darrell McClam.
Bishop’s four children now work together running the McClam Funeral Home. Sons Darnell and Darrell joined their father in the family business before his passing.
While growing up in the Hill, Darnell recalled, he watched his father help others on a daily basis: “Whatever I asked for came after he finished helping the community.”
This motivated Darnell to aspire to the same level of selflessness and empathy as his father, he said.
“It doesn’t matter how low you start. My father was a humble man who knew that the people he helped would bless him one day,” Darnell said.
McClam eldest, Sheena, didn’t speak with her father for the first time until she was 16 years old. Bishop McClam and Sheena’s mother got divorced when she was 3 years old. Sheena’s mother told her that she no longer had contact with her father.
At 16, on Easter Sunday, Sheena asked her mom a final time for a number to contact her father. Her prayers were answered. She called her father, and they spoke for the first time, she said. “Something inside me just told me that he wouldn’t change his number and leave me,” she said.
Bishop told Sheena he purposefully never changed his number so she could get in contact with him one day. “‘No matter how long it took I was never going to change my number,’” she recalled her father telling her.
As their relationship grew, Sheena and her father would make a yearly trip to The King Center in Georgia. They would stop at Dunkin Donuts afterwards for coffee together.
“His family was always on his mind and the most important thing to him,” she said.
Darrell said he learned perseverance from his father: “He never gave up while financing the whole funeral home or when helping people.”
When his father died, Darrell worried about taking on his father’s business and legacy. “What if I fail?” he would ask himself. Then he remembered that “my father prepared us. He showed by example how to help people during their darkest time. And how to facilitate healing.”
“Still even beyond the grave he is still providing for us and helping people,” Darrell said.
The McClam children hope to open up more funeral homes across the state to help others.
Up until January of this year Shawneeque was living in Virginia as an elementary educator. After the passing of her father, her brothers began asking that she return to New Haven to help with the business.
One night last year Shawneeque had a dream about her father calling out her name. “He would always call my name a specific way was I was younger,” she said. “It sounded so real.”
Not long after that dream, Shawneeque moved back to New Haven with a plan to help out the family business for about six months. She said she now plans to stay in New Haven to help the business grow with her siblings.
She recalled her father telling her and her siblings while young, “You’re not always going to have me or your mother around to help you get along with each other. You have to stick together always.”
Shawneeque is working to create the McClam Funeral Home After Care Program to help connect families after a loss to community resources like financial aid, and mental supports.
“We’re doing what God has called us to do for our community, our father, and to leave something behind for our grandchildren.”
Darrell McClam and Sean Hardy.
Elder Sean Hardy served Saturday as the event’s master of ceremonies. Hardy knew McClam since he was 7 years old, he said. “He’s been a model figure to me since I was a boy,” he said.
McClam started a quartet group, the Sensational Pilgrims of Faith, with his brother (who died in 1969) and kept it going until 1971. He then began preaching. In 1978 McClam established the Union Disciple Freewill Baptist Church on Dixwell Avenue.
McClam was known for supporting families who lacked the resources to bury their lost loved ones.
A citation was presented from the Board of Alders to the McClam family in honor of McClam.
Harp: McClam was “a great man who walked among us.”
“We recognize and honor a great man who walked among us,” former Mayor Toni Harp said at the Saturday ceremony. “If you think about what it means to live and have an impact on other people’s lives, sometimes it means that you serve and that you help. And sometimes it’s by a word, a deed, or a song. And Bishop McClam, he spoke the word and optimized the room, and he sung a song that touched the hearts of people.”
