Vanessa Siddle Walker - The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools

ALSO BY VANESSA SIDDLE WALKER

Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South

Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South

Raceing Moral Formation: African American Perspectives on Care and Justice (co-editor with John R. Snarey)

2018 by Vanessa Siddle Walker

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Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2018

Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution

ISBN 978-1-62097-106-2 (ebook)

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This book was set in Minion Pro Regular

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Mother Virginia Tate, without whom

Dr. Tate could not have advocated and

I could not have written

CONTENTS

Table of Contents

Y ou have to talk to Dr. Horace Tate. By January 2000, I had heard this from colleagues several times but had not yet complied. I was an Emory professor who had already spent twelve years probing the story of the segregated schooling of African American children. During that time, I had argued that history already captured the problems imposed on these schools but failed to uncover the resilience of black school communities. In Their Highest Potential, I chronicled the story of professional educators, high expectations, caring school climates, and parental support, a story that resonated with the memories of many in black communities throughout the South.

Perhaps an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about my work that appeared shortly before I, impulsively, first called Dr. Tate helped me gain access. I knew he had been the head of the black educational organization in Georgia in the years before he formally entered politics, and I had become convinced that my continued inquiry into segregated schools required his perspective. Although I would later learn he was an avid daily reader of newspapers, I was not thinking about the article when I finally mustered the courage to dial the number I had been given. I expected to leave a short message with an answering service or a secretary. When, to my surprise, he said Hello, I was ill prepared to explain why I wanted to see him. It was the first of many entry errors, most of them ones I admonished graduate students to avoid.

Dr. Tate agreed to meet with me someplace he called the building. I remember being impressed on the first visit as I ascended the stairs and entered the suite leading to the executive offices of the former black teachers association. We settled at a long table in a formal boardroom beneath the smiling portraits of deceased people I did not know. In front of us on the table as we began to talk was a small stack of papers. I explained my work on black education. He listened, nodded, and sometimes gave me a hint of a smile. Youve got part of the story, he finally said.

Then he launched into his own memories. He spoke of dark roads and secrets, Horace Mann Bond and U.S. presidents, board meetings and Martin Luther King Jr. Occasionally he nodded toward the portraits on the wall, suggesting that something was important about the leadership of those individuals. I listened respectfully. I knew he was talking about something. I just could not figure out what that something was, despite my years of research on segregated schooling.

As I prepared to leave, he said I could take the stack of materials on the table that he had never once referenced. I promised to copy and return them, thanked him, and left. I knew materials on black schools were scarce, so I understood these documents were important, even after I looked at them and they seemed to have nothing to do with his stories.

When I returned a few weeks later to continue our conversation, a new stack of materials sat on the table, a bit higher than the first set. In succeeding months, the stacks grew taller. Eventually he allowed me to enter his former office and peruse the materials on the bookshelves, and he opened the door to the old artifact closet. I still remember the time he placed a complete set of Heraldsthe magazine of the Georgia Teachers and Education Association (GT&EA)in my hand as we stood at the top of the stairs before I left one day. I accepted them with emotional and fumbling gratitude.

My conversations with Dr. Tate lasted two years. In the beginning, we met at the building. When his health began to decline, he would call me at home and launch into accounts as I grabbed my computer and began to type. Am I boring you? he would sometimes ask. Even if he was in the middle of a story I had heard before, I assured him that he was not.

When I am dead, he announced during one session, I want you to go to my wife and tell her to let you see the things in the basement of our home. At that time I had not yet met his wife, Mrs. Virginia Tate, and could not imagine how I would execute his wish. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I finally passed her test for inquisitive researchers and was allowed to follow Dr. Tate for the first time into the sacred hollows of their home basement. I was in research heaven.

His stories continued from this new location. While I still could not connect his life with the material accounts I was given, I continued to listen. Somewhere during every visit, he would join me and the doctoral students I had brought along to help me as I began to comb through documents in his home two or three days a week. He would emerge slowly, wearing a freshly starched and pressed white shirt with a pen in the chest pocket. Hed take a seat and wait for me to ask questions about materials I had read. Before I finished going through the materials in the basement, however, he died.

Even after his death I continued to pursue the trail he had left. The insights from his stories led me throughout America and around the world. Black educators were everywhere I had not looked before. They were in the Library of Congress, at the White House, with attorneys and civil rights activists, in Europe and Africa. But they had been out of the frame of a lens focused primarily on segregated schoolhouses. It took me sixteen additional years beyond his death to push through the secret door he had opened for me and find them.