Making things better for all
An interview with Horace Tate

By Josh Shepherd
UK College of Education
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It is impossible to capture a life's experience within the space of a feature article. Over the span of two days, Georgia State Senator Horace Tate covered enormous ground, from his first teaching experience at a Rosenwald School in Union Point, Georgia, to his election as state senator. These markers bookend a life that saw Tate actively involved in registering Georgia's black citizens to vote in the 50s and 60s, working to desegregate Georgia's black and white teacher associations, being the first black man to run for mayor of Atlanta - not to mention being the first to earn a doctorate from the University of Kentucky. How can one adequately present such a life within the confines of a mere handful of paragraphs? Honestly, it can't be done.

Horace Tate

And even if this article could, Tate would point out that it would be too much about him.

After completing his bachelor's degree, Tate's first job was as a teacher in Union Point, Georgia. It was 1943. At the time, he was the only member of the faculty to have a college degree. Not even the principal, Eli Jackson, had one.

Four months into the school year, Tate was called to Jackson's office to meet with the superintendent, Floyd T. Corry. He was informed that Jackson was being drafted into the army. They asked Tate to take over as principal.

"I told them I was 20 years old and too young to be a principal. But Jackson said I could handle it and Corry said he'd help me. So after four months into my first job, I was principal."

Throughout our interview, Tate was sensitive about using the word "I" too much. All that happened during his career, he pointed out, was not entirely his own doing, but the result of the dedicated work of many people - and there were many who took much greater risks than he.

His wife, Virginia, for example. "In anything I set out to do, Virginia has always supported me," Tate said.

When he decided to pursue a doctorate at the University of Kentucky, Tate was 35 and had a paying job as principal of Fairmont High School in Griffin, Georgia. Virginia was teaching, and they had three children. In terms of career success, they had perhaps done better than most black families could expect in Georgia in the 1950s. He had his bachelor's degree from Fort Valley State College and a master's from Atlanta University.

However, in terms of higher education opportunities for black men, Tate had gone as far as his home state allowed him to go. "In 1957, no university in Georgia offered doctoral programs to black people," he said.

Fortunately, the same was not true in neighboring states. Doctoral programs at the University of Tennessee and the University of Kentucky, among others, admitted black students. UK had been offering undergraduate degrees to blacks since 1949. So Tate had places he could go, but that wasn't the major obstacle to overcome.

What money he and his wife had went to support the family. If he was going to pursue a doctorate, he was going to need financial assistance. In the end, his decision to attend UK was not so much a matter of its being a progressive institution as much as it was the fact that the financial assistance package was ample enough to allow him to leave his family for nearly two years.

"Those were very lean years for us. Virginia was carrying a heavy load working and raising the kids by herself while I was gone." Tate said. He moved into an apartment on Upper Street while Virginia remained in Griffin. He came home holidays and for weekend visits about every two months. It would eventually pay off, though, when Tate earned his degree, the first black in UK's history to earn a doctorate.

Of all his professors in the College of Education, the one he remembers best is A.D. Albright.

"The reason I will remember Dr. Albright is that he was always encouraging me to make my work better. He had high expectations of my work. I remember this one time, I was very close to finishing my dissertation and gave a draft of it to three of my committee members to review.

"When I got Albright's remarks, they were just about the same as the others, except for this one page. He never told me what exactly bothered him about it. He just wrote that certain aspects of this page could use some strengthening. Well, I wasn't sure what he was talking about. I read it over and it seemed fine.

"Albright never said anything except to look closer. It was on my third reading that I began to realize that there was, indeed, something not quite right about that page. Something that didn't exactly fit. I reworked that whole section and when I took it back, Albright smiled and said it was fine.

"I told him then. I said, 'You were trying to tell me that that whole page wasn't worth a damn.' And he replied, 'You said that. I didn't.' Dr. Albright was a remarkable man and our friendship is something I have valued all my life," Tate said.

In 1961, a few years after he finished at UK, Tate was elected executive secretary of the Georgia Teachers and Educators Association (GTEA). At that time, Georgia had two teachers associations - one black, one white. It was one of the last states to finally merge them into one entity, but that effort wouldn't begin until 1965.

Interestingly, however, Tate's election as executive secretary granted him unusual power to be proactive in the effort to register blacks to vote. While legally, blacks had the right to vote for years, there was a concerted effort on the part of many in the state to prevent them from actually exercising that right. It was in the schools, Tate said, that he worked with teachers, ministers, and other leaders in communities all across Georgia to register blacks to vote.

"When people talk about the civil rights movement, they think about the marches and the works of Dr. King. But the whole movement started with black people getting the right to vote. When I was growing up, blacks were denied that right. In my life, there was a time I could not vote. But from the time that I could, I voted. And with the help of a lot of people, we worked to make sure others could, too," Tate said.

Of course, their efforts were met with intense resistance. Teachers active in programs to register new voters often found, at the very least, their jobs threatened by administrators and local boards of education.

Tate, however, was in a position where he was relatively immune from such threats. He was employed by the GTEA board and they were the only people who could fire him. "And they fully supported our programs," he said.

Though his position at the GTEA opened doors for him politically, culminating in his election to the Georgia senate in 1974, talking with Tate, one never gets the impression of a man who sought a political career.

"I have a serious problem with people who seek a political office to improve their own personal positions. It's not what I believe you seek office to do. You seek office to make things better."

A month after being elected to the board of education, the superintendent walked in and handed Tate a check.

"I asked him what this was for and he told me that was my pay for being on the board. I was surprised. I didn't think people got paid. All I cared about was that all Georgia schools, black and white, were at or above standard. That's all I ever wanted to do."

Even though he was elected to many other offices, it is apparent that Tate derived a great deal of personal satisfaction from his leadership of the GTEA. It was, to understate the matter, an interesting time to be executive secretary right in the middle of a volatile period of change.

It was 1965 and time for Georgia's segregated teachers associations to merge into one.

If merging were the only issue, then the transition might not have taken five years. But the black leadership of the GTEA needed guarantees that, when the associations united, some of the major leadership positions would be designated for black members.

"What good would the merger have been if the association had black and white members, but the leadership made up of all whites. We would not agree to a merger without a plan to designate blacks in key leadership positions," Tate said.

It would take five years of negotiation before their task was finished. But at the first meeting in 1965, these issues were not even discussed. In fact, he said, no agenda item was brought up at all.

That first meeting, the boards of the two associations met in one room. Blacks sat on one side and whites on the other.

"The only thing we accomplished at that first meeting was to introduce ourselves. To younger people, that doesn't sound like much. They're too young to understand. To them it's just history in a book," Tate said. In his typical modesty, this man of many accomplishments concluded, "But in that day, at that time, sitting together in one room was a major accomplishment."

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