Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Lost Education of Horace Tate
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Atlanta
STATE: GA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 90629191 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n90629191 |
| HEADING: | Walker, Vanessa Siddle |
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| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca02718719 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |d DLC |d OCoLC |d DLC |e rda |d OCoLC |
| 046 | __ |f 1958-01-06 |2 edtf |
| 100 | 1_ |a Walker, Vanessa Siddle |
| 400 | 1_ |w nne |a Siddle Walker, Vanessa |
| 400 | 1_ |w nne |a Siddle, Emilie V. |
| 400 | 1_ |a Siddle-Walker, Emilie Vanessa |
| 400 | 1_ |a Walker, Emilie Vanessa Siddle- |
| 670 | __ |a Facing racism in education, c1990: |b t.p. (Emilie V. Siddle) |
| 670 | __ |a Their highest potential, c1996: |b CIP t.p. (Vanessa Siddle Walker) pub. info. (Emilie Vanessa Siddle-Walker, Asst. Prof. of Educational Studies, Emory Univ.) |
| 670 | __ |a Phone call to V. Siddle Walker, 10-20-95 |b (Vanessa Siddle Walker, without hyphen between compound surname, is latest form of name and form intended for use on future publs.) |
| 670 | __ |a Hello professor, 2009: |b ECIP t.p. (Vanessa Siddle Walker) change request (Walker is her surname: Walker, Vanessa Siddle) |
| 670 | __ |a Email from University of North Carolina Press, Apr. 24, 2009 |b (Vanessa Siddle Walker; she has chosen to identify her surname as ’Walker’ rather than ’Siddle Walker.’ So, her current stated name is “Walker, Vanessa Siddle.”) |
| 670 | __ |a Living the legacy of African American education, 2017: |b ECIP t.p. (Vanessa Siddle Walker) data view (b. Jan. 6, 1958, Vanessa Siddle Walker is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Prof. of Educ. Studies at Emory Univ. Walker received her training in education at the Univ. of N. Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Harvard Graduate School of Educ.) |
PERSONAL
Born January 6, 1958.
EDUCATION:University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, B.A.; Harvard University, M.Ed., Ed. D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Emory University, Atlanta, GA, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American and Educational Studies. Taught at Cummings High School, Burlington, NC.
MEMBER:American Educational Research Association.
AWARDS:Best New Female Scholar Award, Best New Book Award, Outstanding Book Award, and Early Career Award, all from American Educational Research Association; Grawmeyer Award for Education; awards from Conference of Southern Graduate Schools and American Education Studies Association
WRITINGS
Contributor to journals, including Educational Researcher. Equity and Excellence, Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, and Harvard Educational Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Vanessa Siddle Walker, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of of African American Educational Studies at Emory University. is a historian of education, particularly of the education of African-Americans during the era of segregation. “When I’m writing history, writing about that period, I’m learning about how people made a difference for young people – made them believe in what they could achieve in a time period that, by any standards, was an oppressive time period,” she told Tiffany Pennamon in an interview in the Diverse Issues in Higher Education online edition. Teachers in this era educated the future leaders of the civil rights movement, she noted. In the twenty-first century, she added, many schools with a predominantly black student body are underfunded, so the situation still has much room for improvement–and educators still can learn from the struggles of their predecessors. “We need to explain pedagogical and educational history that has helped generations before us succeed in dire circumstances,” Walker told Pennamon. “We are not the first generation where it’s hard. It’s been hard before.”
Hello Professor
In Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South, Walker and coauthor Ulysses Byas provide a chronicle of Byas’s career. Byas was principal of a black high school in Gainesville, Georgia, in the 1950s and 1960s. He grew up in Macon, Georgia, in a large family with a single mother, and he went to work at age six to contribute to the family’s income. He was able to obtain higher education through the G.I. Bill after World War II. He and Walker examine the various interest groups he had to serve as a principal–white administrators, black students, and the students’ parents. They also look at how professional associations helped black teachers and principals support one another and exchange ideas; because membership in white associates was closed to them, they had to found their own. Desegregation in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling did not necessarily benefit all black educators, the authors report; Byas wanted to become superintendent of his district but was offered the position of assistant superintended instead. The disappointment led him to choose retirement. The book derives its title from the African-American custom of addressing all educators as “professor.”
“Hello Professor contributes to the field of the history of education by offering a personal portrait of a black school administrator during the Jim Crow era,” remarked .Jayne R. Beilke in a review at H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online. “Forced into the role of trickster by an oppressive southern white system, the black principal had to find ways to work ‘within the system’ in order to obtain resources for black schools.” She continued: “Byas managed to construct an educational leadership style that was a blend of formal education, cultural expectations, and social necessity. Historians of education have tended to focus on black leaders in higher education, and Walker’s book not only widens the lens but also reveals the complexity of the position.”
The Lost Education of Horace Tate
The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools profiles another black educator from the days of segregation. Tate (1922-2002) was a teacher, a principal, and eventually a Georgia state senator. Drawing on interviews and archival materials, Walker tells how Tate often lobbied, outside the public eye, for more resources for black schools during his years as an educator. She also details how he took advantage of lucky breaks and networked within educational associations to advance his career. His activism eventually cost him a job, however, as administrators forced him out of his principal’s job because of his alliance with civil rights advocates. He faced even worse consequences at times, however, including death threats and an arson fire at his renter home. He and other black educators played a key role in the movement, though, by providing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with information showing that separate was not equal when it came to schools; this information helped NAACP lawyers like future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall shape their arguments in Brown. Walker interviewed Tate for two years before his death, during which he promised her access to a secret archive of documents relating to this effort. Walker was indeed able to obtain the materials after Tate’s death, and she used them extensively in writing the book. “It changes everything to realize how important educators were,” she told April Hunt in an interview for Emory University’s online Emory Report. “They secretly provided the money, the data on inequality and the plaintiffs. Black educational networks were the invisible thread that helped generate the civil rights movement.”
Several critics thought The Lost Education of Horace Tate told a fascinating tale of one of these “hidden heroes.” “The reader does … get a very real sense of how high the stakes were for Tate and his colleagues,” Michael S. Roth related in the Wall Street Journal. The book, he added, “is a powerful reminder of the link between educators and the struggle for equality and justice in American history.” A Publishers Weekly commentator considered the work a “well-told and inspiring tale, with its rarely discussed angle on the school segregation fight.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor termed it “a fresh, well-documented study of the complex struggle for equality in education.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of African American History, winter, 2011, Bettina L. Love, review of Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South, p. 118.
Journal of Southern History, August, 2011, Gerald L. Smith, review of Hello Professor, p. 778.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2018, review of The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools.
Publishers Weekly, May 28, 2018, review of The Lost Education of Horace Tate, p. 84.
Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2018, Michael S. Roth, review of The Lost Education of Horace Tate.
ONLINE
American Educational Research Association website, http://www.aera.net/ (October 29, 2018), brief biography.
Diverse Issues in Higher Education website, https://diverseeducation.com/ (September 26, 2018), Tiffany Pennamon, “Learning from ‘Absentee’ Mentors.”
Emory Report, https://news.emory.edu/ (July 26, 2018), April Hunt, “Black Educators Played Hidden, Key Role in School Desegregation.”
Emory University website, http://aas.emory.edu/ (October 29, 2018), brief biography.
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, https://networks.h-net.org/ (May 1, 2010), Jayne R. Beilke, review of Hello Professor.
National Academy of Education website, https://naeducation.org/ (October 29, 2018), brief biography.
anessa Siddle Walker, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Educational Studies at Emory University, has been voted president-elect of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). She joins AERA Council this year as President-elect. Her term as president begins on April 9, 2019, at the conclusion of AERA’s 2019 Annual Meeting.
Click here for complete 2018 AERA election results
For more than 25 years, Walker has explored the segregated schooling of African American children, considering sequentially the climate that permeated segregated schools, the network of professional collaborations that explains the similarity across schools, and the hidden systems of advocacy that demanded equality and justice for the children in the schools.
Her research has garnered a number of awards, including the prestigious Grawmeyer Award for Education and the AERA Early Career Award. In addition, she has received awards from the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools, the American Education Studies Association, and three awards from AERA Divisions, including Best New Female Scholar, Best New Book, and Outstanding Book.
In 2012, Walker presented the AERA Annual Brown Lecture in Education Research in Washington, D.C. Her talk, titled “Original Intent: Black Educators in an Elusive Quest for Justice” (webcast |full text in Educational Researcher), was delivered to a packed house. She is an AERA Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Education.
Walker’s current research project, Hidden Provocateurs, brings to light the history of black educators in the fight for justice for black children. It examines black educators’ activities to demand equality in the generations before the Brown v. Board of Education decision, their interconnected story with the Brown decision, and their continued advocacy after the ruling.
Her book based on the project, Hidden Provocateurs: Black Educators in a Century of Secret Struggle, is currently under contract. Walker has authored and edited several other prominent scholarly books, including Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South and Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South.
Upon becoming AERA president in 2019, Walker will succeed Amy Stuart Wells, Professor of Sociology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Wells will assume the AERA presidency on April 17, 2018, after the close of the association’s 2018 Annual Meeting in New York City.
Quoted in Sidelights: “When I’m writing history, writing about that period, I’m learning about how people made a difference for young people – made them believe in what they could achieve in a time period that, by any standards, was an oppressive time period,” “We need to explain pedagogical and educational history that has helped generations before us succeed in dire circumstances,” Walker told Pennamon. “We are not the first generation where it’s hard. It’s been hard before.”
by Tiffany Pennamon
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Dr. Vanessa Siddle Walker began her trajectory into education believing she wanted to be a journalist. She enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a journalism major but discovered that the field was not her calling.
“I quickly learned that I didn’t like how journalists were expected to write because I wanted to talk about context and they wanted you to be very pristine,” Walker says.
Soon, she had the opportunity to work with students – substituting for a former high school teacher and engaging with students at a vacation Bible school class during the summer.
“I loved it … I derived energy from teaching,” she adds, noting that she decided to switch majors. “I’ve never looked back on that.”
Dr. Vanessa Siddle Walker
Walker pursued graduate studies in English education and teaching, curriculum and learning environments, earning a master’s degree and an Ed.D. from Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Her interdisciplinary interests in teaching, history and school desegregation have molded her scholarship and her own pedagogy in teaching students at Wheelock College, Elon University, the University of Pennsylvania and, currently, Emory University, where she holds the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professorship of African-American Educational Studies.
For Walker, elements of teaching and history are “all blended,” she says, because the research she does focuses on the segregated schooling of African-American children.
“When I’m writing history, writing about that period, I’m learning about how people made a difference for young people – made them believe in what they could achieve in a time period that, by any standards, was an oppressive time period,” Walker says. “So I’m learning about good teachers and teaching at the same time that I’m facing doctoral students or undergraduate students, and I also try to keep up my skills with high school students.”
Walker takes her students on field trips and shares historical and contemporary stories on African-American pedagogy and teacher advocacy. She adds that much of her teaching and mentoring style for her Emory students does not derive from what she learned in school.
“It really comes from those old Black teachers who have become, in effect, my absentee mentors,” she says. “I really do try to have high expectations for my students for what they’ll do and what they’ll become. I teach in a way that’s very similar to the people that I write about.”
Walker is the author of numerous scholarly publications, articles and books, including Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South; Living the Legacy: The Historical African American Professional Network as a Model for University and School Collaborations and most recently, The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools.
In The Lost Education of Horace Tate, Walker traces the crucial role of Black teachers back into the historical narrative of school desegregation. These Black teachers of the not-so-distant past built strong advocacy networks and taught their students to aspire to be “full participants in a democratic structure denied to them,” while also teaching them to critique democracy, Walker says.
The “Civil Rights Movement was a created generation infused by the curriculum that these people put in their schools,” she adds.
As efforts to achieve total desegregation floundered over the decades due to active resistance from opponents of integration, the closing or demoting of Black schools and the firing of thousands of Black principals and educators, Walker envisions The Lost Education of Horace Tate to be a “dire portrait of where we are now” in education.
It is both a historical work to understand how the nation has fared on efforts to desegregate schools – even as some school districts are more segregated than before – and a work that challenges the U.S. to move toward how schools “should have been integrated,” Walker adds.
Walker has given widely-publicized lectures, and her work appears in journals such as the Harvard Educational Review, Review of Education Research, American Educational Research Journal and Teachers College Record.
The scholar has been recognized for her work spanning over more than two decades with honors and awards that include the prestigious Grawmeyer Award in Education and the American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Early Career Award, Best New Female Scholar Award, the Best New Book Award and the Outstanding Book Award.
During her time at Emory, Walker has served as the project founder and director of Teaching in the Urban South (TITUS).
She has also received awards from the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools and the American Education Studies Association. In March, she was voted president-elect of AERA, and she will assume the presidency in April 2019.
Her advice to younger generations of educators is to “know who you are” and to learn about the strategies needed to remain resilient for staying the course for change.
“We need to explain pedagogical and educational history that has helped generations before us succeed in dire circumstances,” Walker says of her educational responsibility. “We are not the first generation where it’s hard. It’s been hard before.”
Tiffany Pennamon can be reached at tpennamon@diverseeducation.com. You can follow her on Twitter @tiffanypennamon.
This article appeared in the September 20, 2018 edition of Diverse. This is one in a series of profiles about distinguished professors of education.
Vanessa Siddle Walker
Member Since: 2018
Personal Website
Vanessa Siddle Walker is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Educational Studies at Emory University. For 25 years, she has explored the segregated schooling of African American children, considering sequentially the climate that permeated the schools, the network of professional collaborations that explains the schools’ similarities, and the hidden systems of advocacy that sought equality and justice.
Walker’s book publications include Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (University of North Carolina Press), Facing Racism in Education (Harvard Educational Review Reprint Series), Racing Moral Formation (Teachers College Press), and Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South (University of North Carolina Press), and Living the Legacy: Universities and Schools in Collaborative for African American Children (Rowan and Little). Forthcoming in July 2018 is The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the hidden heroes who fought for justice in schools (The New Press). Among the journals publishing her research are Review of Education Research, American Educational Research Journal, Journal of Educational Research, Harvard Educational Review, Journal of Negro Education, and Teachers College Record.
For her body of work, Walker has received the Grawmeyer Award for Education and four awards from AERA: the AERA Early Career Award, the Best New Female Scholar Award (Research Focus on Black Education), the Best New Book (History Division of AERA), and the Outstanding Book Award (Moral Development Special Interest Group). She is also a recipient of awards from the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools and the American Education Studies Association.
Walker is a former National Academy of Education Fellow and a Fellow of AERA. She has lectured widely nationally and internationally, including delivering the 2012 Annual AERA Brown v. Board of Education lecture in Washington, DC. Her work appeared in the PBS Special, SCHOOL, and she has consulted with journalists for the last ten years on issues concerning Brown v. Board and its implementation.
Walker completed her undergraduate training in education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; taught for four years at the desegregated Cummings High School in Burlington, North Carolina; and finished her masters and doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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Vanessa Siddle Walker
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Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American and Educational Studies
Email: vwalker@emory.edu
Biography
Vanessa Siddle Walker is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Educational Studies (B.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; M.Ed Harvard University; Ed. D Harvard University). For 25 years, she has explored the segregated schooling of African American children, considering sequentially the climate that permeated segregated schools, the network of professional collaborations that explains the similarity across schools, and the hidden systems of advocacy that demanded equality and justice for the children in the schools. Her research has garnered a number of awards, including the prestigious $200,000 Grawmeyer Award for Education and the American Educational Association (AERA) Early Career Award. In addition, she has received awards from the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools, the American Education Studies Association, and three awards from AERA Divisions, including the Best New Female Scholar Award, the Best New Book Award, and the Outstanding Book Award.
Walker’s current research project, Hidden Provocateurs, brings to light the history of black educators in the fight for justice for black children. It examines black educators’ activities to demand equality in the generations before the Brown v. Board of Education decision, their interconnected story with the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and their continued advocacy after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. By elevating the role of these black educators, Hidden Provocateurs challenges, expands, or contextualizes every popular book of civil rights, educational history, and Brown v. Board of Education commentary. In its pages, well-known public advocates such as Walter White, James Weldon Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois are intertwined with the unknown generations of educators such as H. A. Hunt, Charles Harper and, finally, the book’s central figure: Horace Edward Tate. Collectively, their activities reveal an intricate system of symbiotic collaboration identifiable in every generation’s effort to effect equality of opportunity for all children.
Walker has consulted widely with media, participating in the PBS Special, SCHOOL, and has shared her research nationally and internationally for more than 25 years. In 2012 she delivered the American Educational Research Association’s annual Brown v. Board of Education Lecture in Washington, DC with the webcast viewed by more than 500 people in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, Peru, Qatar, South Africa, Taiwan, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Since the Brown Lecture, she has provided Keynote Addresses for the U.S. Department of Education; the National Organization of Black Elected Legislative Women; the Kansas City-Missouri Emancipation Proclamation Celebration; the University of Cape Coast, Ghana; Teachers College Columbia; Howard University; Michigan Law School; American Educational Research Association; University Council for Educational Administration; the University of Georgia; and Duquesne University. Walker is a former National Academy of Education Fellow and in 2009 was named a Fellow of AERA.
Additional Information
Vanessa Siddle Walker previously taught courses in the History of Education, African American Educational History, and Qualitative Research Methods in the Division of Educational Studies. Her courses in the Department of African American Studies have included Education in Georgia in Black and White, The Past is Present: TITUS Internship, So You Want to Teach for America? Resurrecting an African American Pedagogical Model for Education in American School, and Contemporary Issues in African American Education: TITUS Seminar.
Books:
Walker, Vanessa Siddle. Hidden Provocateurs: Black Educators in a Century of Secret Struggle. New York: New Press, Under Contract.
Walker, Vanessa Siddle. Living the Legacy: The Historical African American Professional Network as a Model for University and School Collaborations. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Under Contract.
Walker, Vanessa Siddle with Ulysses Byas. Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in a Segregated Community. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Walker, Vanessa Siddle and John Snarey, eds. Race-ing Moral Formation: African American Perspectives on Care, Justice, and Moral Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 2004.
Walker, Vanessa Siddle. Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Hidalgo, N., McDowell, C., Siddle, eds. Facing Racism in American Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review Reprint Series, 1990.
Selected Refereed Articles:
Walker, Vanessa Siddle. “Black Educators in an Elusive Quest for Justice.” Educational Researcher 42, no. 4 (2013): 207-222.
Walker, Vanessa Siddle. “Tolerated Tokenism, or the Injustice in Justice: Black Teacher Organizations and Their Forgotten Struggle for Educational Justice, 1921-1954.” Equity and Excellence 46, no. 1 (2013): 64-80.
Walker, Vanessa Siddle. "Second-class integration: A Historical Perspective for a Contemporary Agenda.” Harvard Educational Review 79, no. 2 (2009), 269-284.
Walker, Vanessa Siddle. “Organized Resistance and Black Educators’ Quest for School Equality, 1878-1938. Teachers College Record 107, no. 3 (2005): 355-388.
Walker, Vanessa Siddle. “After Methods, Then What?” Teachers College Record 107, no. 1 (2005): 30-37.
Walker, Vanessa Siddle. "Brown and its Impact on Schools and American Life." American Bar Association Focus on Law Studies 19 (2004): 1-17.
Walker, Vanessa Siddle and Ulysses Byas. “The Architects of Black Schooling in the Segregated South: The Case of One Principal Leader.” Journal of Curriculum and Supervision 19 no. 1 (2003): 54-72.
Walker, Vanessa Siddle. “African American Teachers in Segregated Schools in the South, 1940-1969.” American Educational Research Journal 38, no. 4 (2001): 751-780.
Walker, Vanessa Siddle. “Valued Segregated Schools for African American Children in the South, 1935-1969: A Review of Common Themes and Characteristics.” Review of Educational Research 70. no. 3 (2000): 253-285.
Walker, Vanessa Siddle. “Research at Risk: Lessons Learned in an African American Community. Educational Foundations 9, no. 1(1995): 5-15.
Walker, Vanessa Siddle. “Caswell County Training School, 1933-1969: Relationships Between Community and School.” Harvard Educational Review 63, no. 2 (1993): 161-182.
Walker, Vanessa Siddle. “Interpersonal Caring in the 'good' Segregated Schooling of African-American Children: Evidence from the Case of Caswell County Training School.” Urban Review 25, no. 1 (1993): 63-77.
Quoted in Sidelights: “a fresh, well-documented study of the complex struggle for equality in education.”
Walker, Vanessa Siddle: THE LOST EDUCATION OF HORACE TATE
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Walker, Vanessa Siddle THE LOST EDUCATION OF HORACE TATE New Press (Adult Nonfiction) $32.99 7, 31 ISBN: 978-1-62097-105-5
A historian of black education discovers an underground network of advocates and reformers.
Drawing on two years of interviews and more than 15 years of research, Walker (African- American Education Studies/Emory Univ.; Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South, 2009, etc.) focuses on the career of teacher, school principal, and Georgia state senator Horace Tate (1922-2002) to offer a new perspective on segregated schooling and education reform in the South. Before embarking on research for this book, Walker believed the "repeatedly told and almost universally accepted" story that "the NAACP protested injustice and crafted the successful Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case" that incited grass-roots movements, civil disobedience, and legal protests. Tate's testimony, however, along with the massive amount of archival material he provided for her, revealed generations of black educators acting strategically and covertly to achieve change. While the NAACP served as the face of reform, the organization could not have succeeded without these behind-the-scenes players. Much of Tate's career happened by accident: He attended Fort Valley State College, where by chance he took a part-time job as student chauffeur for the college's president, Horace Mann Bond, a savvy administrator who "manipulated the levers needed" to solve problems. By observing Bond, Tate learned how to achieve goals by focusing on the weaknesses, psychology, and prejudices of his opponents. Tate's first teaching job came by accident, too, when a principal, studying at Fort Valley, needed to hire a college graduate to teach in his high school. Through that position, Tate became a member of the Georgia Teachers and Education Association, an active and influential society of black educators (Tate eventually became executive secretary). When the principal was drafted into World War II, Tate took over as administrator. As he rose in the profession, he became involved in teacher training and designing innovative curricula that he
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kept "concealed from white eyes" who would object to an ambitious vision for black students. A fresh, well-documented study of the complex struggle for equality in education.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Walker, Vanessa Siddle: THE LOST EDUCATION OF HORACE TATE." Kirkus Reviews, 15
May 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538294011 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=b60805cd. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538294011
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Quoted in Sidelights: “well-told and inspiring tale, with its rarely discussed angle on the school segregation fight.” t
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The Lost Education of Horace Tate:
Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who
Fought for Justice in Schools
Publishers Weekly.
265.22 (May 28, 2018): p84. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools
Vanessa Siddle Walker. New Press, $32.99 (480p) ISBN 978-1-620971-05-5
In this narrative history backed up with detailed scholarship, Walker, professor of African- American educational studies at Emory University, sheds light on the mostly unsung heroes-- black teachers, principals, and other school personnel--in the battle for equal education in the South leading up to Brown v. Board of Education. Drawing on two years of interviews and the long-hidden archives of lifelong education activist Horace Tate, a former Georgia state senator who was a school teacher and principal in his younger years, the author recounts how Tate and others secretly fought the "separate but equal" ethos to get roomier buildings, school buses, and other educational necessities for African-American pupils. Their work had to be clandestine because, Walker writes, "even those trying to fly under the radar who attempted to challenge inequality could pay with their livelihoods, their health and sometimes their lives." Walker gleans facts and colorful details from documents like letters and meeting minutes to illuminate how the personable Tate and his colleagues, "masterly tricksters," deliberately obfuscated their activist roles behind their docile public faces as teachers and principals. This well-told and inspiring tale, with its rarely discussed angle on the school segregation fight, will draw in readers interested in meaningful work and activism, or just a well-told tale. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
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"The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools." Publishers Weekly, 28 May 2018, p. 84. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541638838/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=10e2cc91. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541638838
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Hello Professor: A Black Principal
and Professional Leadership in the
Segregated South
Bettina L. Love
The Journal of African American History.
96.1 (Winter 2011): p118+. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Love, Bettina L. "Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the
Segregated South." The Journal of African American History, vol. 96, no. 1, 2011, p. 118+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A251633490 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=0a9f9b09. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A251633490
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Hello Professor: A Black Principal
and Professional Leadership in the
Segregated South
Gerald L. Smith
Journal of Southern History.
77.3 (Aug. 2011): p778+. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Smith, Gerald L. "Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the
Segregated South." Journal of Southern History, vol. 77, no. 3, 2011, p. 778+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A264269855/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=3184776c. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A264269855
6 of 6 9/30/18, 6:02 PM
Quoted in Sidelights: “Hello Professor contributes to the field of the history of education by offering a personal portrait of a black school administrator during the Jim Crow era,” remarked .Jayne R. Beilke in a review at H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online. “Forced into the role of trickster by an oppressive southern white system, the black principal had to find ways to work ‘within the system’ in order to obtain resources for black schools.” She continued: “Byas managed to construct an educational leadership style that was a blend of formal education, cultural expectations, and social necessity. Historians of education have tended to focus on black leaders in higher education, and Walker’s book not only widens the lens but also reveals the complexity of the position.”
Beilke on Walker and Byas, 'Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South'
Author:
Vanessa Siddle Walker, Ulysses Byas
Reviewer:
Jayne R. Beilke
Vanessa Siddle Walker, Ulysses Byas. Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xiv + 293 pp. $32.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-3289-9.
Reviewed by Jayne R. Beilke (Department of Educational Studies, Ball State University Tchr Col) Published on H-Education (May, 2010) Commissioned by Jonathan Anuik
Contradictions of Black Public School Leadership in the Pre-Brown Era
A small book written by Beth Day in 1955 entitled The Little Professor of Piney Woods told the story of Laurence Clifton Jones, president and founder of Piney Woods Country Life School. In many ways, Jones is the antecedent of Ulysses Byas, the subject of Hello Professor. African Americans applied the term “Professor” or “Fesser” to educated black men, particularly those who were teachers. Jones (1884-1975) earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Iowa in 1907. He then spent a year in the South, teaching in a Mississippi school. Inspired by Booker T. Washington, Jones established a school in Rankin County, Mississippi, in 1909, that featured an agricultural-industrial curriculum.
Two generations later, Byas served as the principal of a black high school in Gainesville, Georgia, during the 1950s and 1960s. Vanessa Siddle Walker’s book is an examination of how Byas navigated this difficult social period--in particular, how a black principal negotiated the complicated territory of serving as a black school administrator in the segregated South on the cusp of the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Walker’s book is divided into six chapters, plus an introduction and a conclusion. She also provides a useful explanation of methodology and delimitations.
Her treatment of a black school administrator is an outgrowth of her first book, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (1996), a study of the Caswell County (North Carolina) Training School (CCTS). Walker explains that Byas’s voice is a substitute for that of the principal of the CCTS, N. L. Dillard. Since Dillard was deceased by the time of Walker’s research for Their Highest Potential, Byas became a surrogate and an informant for this current study. The title Hello Professor refers to Byas’s title as well as to his salutation to Walker during the interview process. According to Walker, the comparison of the meaning and circumstances of their relative “professorships” not only created a cultural bridge from one black educational professional to another but also a “sacred historical and cultural space where scholarship, mission, and responsibility merged” (p. xiii). It seems to have also provided an opportunity to reflect on her professional life as laid against that of black professionals from an earlier time. It should be noted that this is a professional biography rather than a full-fledged treatment of Byas’s life, however. By way of explanation, Walker states, “Hello Professor uses an individual biography as it intersected with a systematic structure to make more explicit the similarity of black educational activity and mission evident in the individual case studies” (p. 5).
Born in 1924, Byas was raised by a single mother in Macon, Georgia. He began working at the age of six to help support the large family. He graduated from Hudson Industrial School, joined the United States Navy, and then enrolled in Fort Valley State College. His pursuit of graduate work reveals a break with tradition. As was customary prior to the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, blacks often took advantage of out-of-state tuition scholarships given to black students so that they could travel to northern states for graduate study. Although the practice was ruled illegal in Gaines v. Canada (1938), the use of the scholarships allowed the governments of southern states to circumvent calls for the integration of higher education as well as the commitment of more state resources to provide opportunities for graduate study at black universities. Under this pattern, students were oftentimes only able to attend institutions during the summer. As a result, the completion of a graduate degree often took several years. Byas chose to forego this method of funding his education since he had resources available from the G. I. Bill and was, therefore, able to pursue graduate education at Teachers College-Columbia as a full-time student. At Columbia, he encountered Harold Rugg and Ruth Strang, both of whom, according to Byas, left a lasting impression on him. After a year of study, he took a teaching job at Blackwell Memorial School in Elberton, Georgia.
The most cohesive portion of the book is the three chapters detailing the purpose and activities of the black professional organizations and the extent to which Byas relied on them for support. Walker concludes that “two interrelated forms of professional development help explain Byas’s vision as a professor” (p. 81): national school accreditation organizations, such as the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (Southern Association); and state and local organizations, such as the Georgia Teachers and Education Association (GTEA). These professional organizations constituted a formalized structure of support and professional development. Byas also describes an informal system of mentoring that occurred when he was travelling to professional conferences with colleagues from other schools or by exposure to African Americans who represented higher education at the conferences.
Since blacks could not join the Southern Association under Jim Crow, the Association of Colleges and Schools (Association) was the black counterpart to the Southern Association. The Association dated to 1928 and was formed in reaction to the publication of the Arthur J. Klein report, “Survey of Nero Colleges and Universities,” which criticized the facilities, curriculum, faculty, and administration of black institutions of higher education.[1] The Southern Association, however, was the body that “approved” black colleges and universities. In the accommodationist tradition of Washington, black administrators assured the Southern Association that they would not press for “joint” meetings, but they did request leadership and technical assistance in order to improve black schools. Black administrators and teachers used the Southern Association accreditation criteria to evaluate black schools, complete a self-study, and go through external review. If they passed, however, they could be “approved” but not “accredited.” Nevertheless, “approval” became the goal and focus of the Association. A more subversive agenda was to use the approval status to lobby for equity in access to resources. Although this classification was the stepchild to the accreditation awarded to white schools, it was better than nothing. In addition, membership in the Association provided a venue not only for networking but also for the sharing and dissemination of ideas and materials. Moreover, the focus of the Association was specifically on the education of black children, an element that was ignored by the Southern Association. Byas learned about the use of surveys and methods of assessments with which he could make the case for additional resources from members of the black intelligentsia that included psychologists, sociologists, and educators, such as Kenneth B. Clarke, Allison Davis, Whitney Young, and Charles S. Johnson.
Another national agency that focused on black children was the American Teachers Association (ATA). Formed in 1903, the ATA was the black counterpart to the National Education Association (NEA). But here again, the NEA did not concentrate on the needs of black children and did not have a social justice agenda. The ATA provided collegial support, professional development, and the opportunity to learn administrative strategies. It also assisted black administrators to remain connected to the black community, which was of primary importance. Locally, the School Masters Club, which consisted of the principals of black approved schools in Georgia, functioned as a sort of elite membership of black administrators of approved schools. It provided three services: mentorship and modeling of practice, collaborative discussion of curricular innovations, and research projects that could lead to increased opportunities for students. It mirrored the Georgia Education Association, which was a white educational organization.
Walker and Byas struggle to achieve a focus for the book. They experience difficulty deciding if it should be a biographical study of Byas, a case study of a black principal, or a historical account of the function of black school organizations in the pre-Brown era. Certainly all three aspects are intertwined, but they seem to pull away from each other rather than to make Byas the “central conduit” of a black educational system operating within a white world (p. 8). Organizationally, Walker states that she reordered some of the chapters as a result of feedback from Byas. It might have been helpful to begin the book with chapter 2, “From High School Dropout to Classroom Teacher” instead of “Playing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The term “playing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” is not attributed directly to Byas but to Clemmont Vontress, a black guidance director in Indiana who wrote in an issue of the Phi Delta Kappan that the “Negro principal must respond to the expectations of the superintendent, who is generally white, and to his teachers, who are usually Negro. This dual responsibility creates an ethnic dilemma for him” (p. 25). Walker, however, argues that it was a deliberate façade--a kind of double-consciousness necessitated by the need to discuss black student achievement within a dominant white context. Indeed, the black principal had to appear to side with a variety of constituencies: the black community, black teachers and students, and white administrators. Although this was crucial to the success of black school professionals, it is not the general theme of the book.
The authors do not address the paternalism of school administrators in the context of the sexism of the period. By way of explanation Walker states, "Since most of the high school professors and black intellectual elite were male, Byas’s perspective on these events is that of a male administrator. The voice of women, in general, (and female professors in particular) is not included in part because gendered differences in the experiences are not typically addressed in the sources” (p. 235). The reader does not hear from teachers or students and that too is a delimitation that Walker admits.
In addition, Byas indicates that one of his regrets was that black parents gave black schools too much autonomy in regard to their children’s welfare and were (in comparison with white parents) generally absent during a period when Byas was running a desegregated summer school. One wonders if there is a cultural or social class explanation (as Byas suggests) or if Byas’s authoritarian personality was not challenged by black parents, thereby inviting another explanation. Nevertheless, there is no question that Hello Professor contributes to the historiography of black educational leadership during this period. It also, however, reinforces the notion that the initial hopefulness about Brown v. Board gave way quickly with the demise of black professional organizations and schools. This is poignantly reflected in Byas’s bitter disappointment at being offered the “assistant superintendent” rather than the superintendent position in the wake of the ruling. Rather than take a subordinate role, Byas chose to retire. Much like the closing of CCTS as the result of desegregation in Walker’s earlier book, the effect of Brown was to provide opportunities as well as to constrain them.
Hello Professor contributes to the field of the history of education by offering a personal portrait of a black school administrator during the Jim Crow era. Forced into the role of trickster by an oppressive southern white system, the black principal had to find ways to work “within the system” in order to obtain resources for black schools. At the same time, he had to gain the support of the black community and teachers. Although the lessons learned at Teachers College-Columbia must have seemed largely irrelevant in this milieu, Byas managed to construct an educational leadership style that was a blend of formal education, cultural expectations, and social necessity. Historians of education have tended to focus on black leaders in higher education, and Walker’s book not only widens the lens but also reveals the complexity of the position.
Note
[1]. Arthur J. Klein, "Survey of Negro Colleges and Universities," U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Bulletin 7 (Washington DC: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1929).
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=29602
Citation: Jayne R. Beilke. Review of Walker, Vanessa Siddle; Byas, Ulysses, Hello Professor: A Black Principal and Professional Leadership in the Segregated South. H-Education, H-Net Reviews. May, 2010. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29602
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Quoted in Sidelights: “The reader does … get a very real sense of how high the stakes were for Tate and his colleagues,” Michael S. Roth related in the Wall Street Journal. The book, he added, “is a powerful reminder of the link between educators and the struggle for equality and justice in American history.”
‘The Lost Education of Horace Tate’ Review: Civil Rights for Schoolchildren
An education reformer who worked tirelessly for black students in his home state of Georgia while fighting stiff resistance along the way. Michael S. Roth reviews “The Lost Education of Horace Tate” by Vanessa Siddle Walker.
Dr. Martin Luther King and Dr. Horace Tate in 1967.
Dr. Martin Luther King and Dr. Horace Tate in 1967. Photo: The GT&EA Collection
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By Michael S. Roth
Aug. 21, 2018 7:02 p.m. ET
It’s a historian’s dream, really: meet someone who played a crucial but mostly unsung role in a major historical development; become that person’s confidant; hear firsthand the stories of triumph, frustration and struggle; and then receive a death-bed request to rescue a trove of documents that substantiate those stories, so that future generations can better understand the historical development.
This dream became real for Emory professor Vanessa Siddle Walker, who met Horace Tate (1922-2002) at the end of his long and eventful life and then discovered the archives of the Georgia Teachers and Education Association—the vital organization of black educators that he led for more than a decade. Ms. Walker’s “The Lost Education of Horace Tate” tells the story of generations of black teachers and administrators who fought heroically over many decades for equality and justice.
For many, the struggle for civil rights in education centers on the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Ms. Walker’s account makes visible a previously “unseen network of black educators” in Georgia and across the South who had been pushing for change ever since Reconstruction. They had to be persistent because the forces defending white supremacy were intransigent and often dangerous. In 1878 black educators asked for equal funding for black children; in 1920 they requested equal salaries for black teachers. By the 1960s those requests had turned into demands, and still they went unmet.
‘The Lost Education of Horace Tate’ Review: Civil Rights for Schoolchildren
Photo: WSJ
The Lost Education of Horace Tate
By Vanessa Siddle Walker
New Press, 468 pages, $32.99
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Horace Tate was born in Elberton, Ga., and became the principal of a high school in nearby Union Point at age 21. He would eventually become the first African-American to earn a doctorate from the University of Kentucky. Throughout Tate’s life, Ms. Walker argues, he found ways to channel his anger at everyday indignities into strategies for change. He refused to accept that he was a second-class teacher, or a second-class citizen, and (though it’s beyond the time frame of this study) he would go on to serve 16 years in the Georgia state senate.
Ms. Walker’s book, which draws on the archives of the Georgia Teachers and Education Association, is an important contribution to our understanding of how ordinary people found the strength to fight for equality for schoolchildren and their teachers. Asking for a bus so your kids could get from your farm to the school? For a gymnasium in which your basketball team could practice? For basic textbooks so your children could learn? Such requests to school-district authorities were generally met with disdain or worse. At times educators faced intimidation, arson, even murder. Tate received death threats and returned home one summer to find the house he rented burned to the ground.
“The Lost Education of Horace Tate” provides a granular feel for the hopes, fears and frustrations of teachers and school administrators who struggled for basic justice. Unfortunately, sometimes the detail is excessive; too much time is spent on the routine speeches and logistics of professional meetings. We learn more than enough about various officials in different teaching organizations and their subtle disagreements, but very little indeed about Horace Tate’s personal life. His first marriage deserves more than a sentence, and his family is much too far in the background for the reader to understand how his life and work were intertwined.
The reader does, however, get a very real sense of how high the stakes were for Tate and his colleagues. They desperately wanted their pupils to enjoy the educational benefits that white students often took for granted. As the federal government increased support for education, many states fought to maintain unequal regimes without giving up federal funding. Tate and his colleagues at every turn resisted these efforts by vigilantly making the case that expenditures for white school children—on everything from plumbing to school supplies—had to be matched by spending on African-American children.
Later, as larger groups of educators took up the mantle of integration, black education networks sometimes had to fight to maintain influence within the movement. “Second-class integration,” Tate feared, would marginalize black professionals by making them powerless minorities within larger, mostly white, organizations.
Horace Tate was very good at his job, but this didn’t keep him from being forced out of his position as a principal when local officials suspected (rightly) that he was aligning himself with community forces aiming at equality—and, especially, with regional and national groups aiming to ensure African-American citizens could exercise their right to vote. By turning out and being counted at the polls, blacks in the South could gain at least some leverage over politicians, and so there was a concerted effort to deprive them of the franchise. As former Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge put it in 1946: “If you white people love your country, you will challenge” the black people who registered. The sentiment behind these words finds echoes wherever politicians create obstacles to voting.
Ms. Walker’s account of Horace Tate’s professional life is also the story of his political education, including the ideal of citizenship that he taught his pupils. “Negro children required lessons in democracy,” she writes, “so they could see the ways in which America violated its own principles.” This disparity between principles and reality is something Horace Tate was confronted with day in and day out, year after year. Now, thanks to Ms. Walker’s historical work, his story is no longer a “lost education” but is being preserved and passed on.
Reading her book is a powerful reminder of the link between educators and the struggle for equality and justice in American history. For Horace Tate and his colleagues, teaching the lessons of democracy was never about indoctrination. It was—as it remains today—about deepening students’ awareness of the promise of American ideals and how much work is necessary to make them more than a dream.
Mr. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University. Among his books are “Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters” and “Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living With the Past.”
Appeared in the August 22, 2018, print edition as 'Civil Rights For Schoolchildren.'
Quoted in Sidelights: . “It changes everything to realize how important educators were,” she told April Hunt in an interview for Emory University’s online Emory Report. “They secretly provided the money, the data on inequality and the plaintiffs. Black educational networks were the invisible thread that helped generate the civil rights movement.”
Black educators played hidden, key role in school desegregation
By April Hunt | Emory Report | July 26, 2018
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Emory professor Vanessa Siddle Walker’s new book, “The Lost Education of Horace Tate,” explores the hidden history of African American educators working to end the system of segregated schools.
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Vanessa Siddle Walker’s new book, “The Lost Education of Horace Tate,” takes the shape of a mystery, fitting for a narrative that features a hidden office, clandestine meetings under the cover of dark and other secrets that add to the history of segregated schooling.
We meet the title character in the introduction, when Tate was an aging retired Georgia state senator. Walker, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Studies at Emory College, reached out to him on the advice of colleagues familiar with her acclaimed research on the segregated education system.
Tate goes on to talk with Walker for two years about his early role as a teacher and principal, sharing stories of covert travel and meetings with fellow educators, Martin Luther King Jr. and powerful politicians to advance education for black children.
After Tate died in 2002, Walker honored his final wish and discovered a hidden attic in his downtown Atlanta office. The secret space was a trove of archival material that backed up Tate’s tales and revealed the whodunit: teachers’ organizations, not the NAACP, shaped the events that led to, and came after, the Supreme Court’s desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.
“We didn’t think to consider how Thurgood Marshall knew who would litigate,” Walker says. “An entire hidden network of black educators committed to being certain that black children had the same educational opportunities white children had were central agents in connecting those local advocates with the national NAACP.
“It changes everything to realize how important educators were,” she adds. “They secretly provided the money, the data on inequality and the plaintiffs. Black educational networks were the invisible thread that helped generate the civil rights movement.”
Rethinking how schools desegregated
It is a history that Walker has researched for 25 years. “Their Highest Potential,” her book examining the learning environment in the classroom of a segregated school and its link to the broader community, garnered Walker the prestigious Grawmeyer Award for Education and the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Early Career Award. This spring, she was voted president-elect of the AERA based on her work.
Tate lived that history. A graduate of Fort Valley State College and the first black PhD graduate from the University of Kentucky, he began working in the segregated education system as a high school teacher in 1943.
He later rose to principal and then head of the black educators’ society, the Georgia Teachers and Education Association (GTEA).
Tate’s observations as a student driver for Horace Mann Bond, the president of Fort Valley, taught him how to use opponents’ prejudices and weaknesses to achieve goals. He learned not only how to officially succeed, but also the value in hiding his work to design an ambitious curricula for black students and training program for teachers.
That same savvy led him to squirrel away the records of black schools and the black school system of Georgia. Nearly a dozen filing cabinets and stacks of files were hidden for decades in the former GTEA upper-floor offices, until Tate told Walker about his stash.
“The collection shows how Dr. Tate and black educators created a curriculum that shows America is not living up to its promise of equality,” says Walker, who spent 15 years going through the massive collection to piece together how the hidden network functioned.
“They created a generation of kids who are not mad but have the desire and education to make American better,” she explains. “Dr. Tate’s legacy, and that of other educators who were activists, really forces us to rethink how we desegregated and how we fell when those advocacy networks went away.”