For the past twenty-five years, Vanessa Siddle-Walker's research has forced us to interrogate deeply held notions about segregated schooling. Challenging assumptions that all-black schools of the Jim Crow South were inherently inferior institutions, her groundbreaking work urged black educational historiography in important new directions, depicting their principals as widely respected, highly trained, and politically savvy leaders. In her latest book, Siddle-Walker widens the lens on black school leadership with her portrayal of another extraordinary principal, Horace Tate, whose advocacy precipitated several school integration victories in Georgia during the civil rights movement. Tate's story reveals a hidden campaign waged by a network of southern black educators demanding equal school funding, and ultimately, the end of legal school segregation—well before the NAACP gained prominence. Siddle-Walker illuminates a forgotten history, reminding readers the breadth of contributions black educators have afforded American society.
Combining oral history with traditional archival methods, her historical ethnography loops between sources to uncover the hidden inner workings of black educators and their networks. The prologue establishes the extent of Tate's prominence, evidenced by his close relationship with Martin Luther King Jr. Tate invited King to speak at the 1967 Georgia Teachers and Education Association (GT&EA) annual conference, an almost fifteen-thousand-member organization for which Tate served as executive director. Siddle-Walker confirms Tate and King collaborated numerous times in pursuit of racial integration. In fact, throughout the book, Tate is documented as coming in contact and even working closely with a number of preeminent black male leaders of the day, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Horace Mann Bond, James Weldon Johnson, Thurgood Marshall, among others.
The book is subsequently divided into three parts. The first serves as a portrait of Tate's early days as an educator. Always immersed in black social, cultural, and political circles, he quickly became privy to “invisible strategies” for engaging in complex race work. Many of these lessons, Siddle-Walker argues, were transmitted covertly via mentorship from close advisers who taught ways to navigate between public discourse and private action. Tate applied these tactics as principal of Union Point and Greensboro High Schools, where he secured various facilities and resources from reluctant white school boards. According to Siddle-Walker, black leaders were often able to manipulate white politicians and philanthropists by performing subservience while concealing their true, subversive intentions. She repeatedly utilizes old Br'er Rabbit West African folklore to contextualize the “trickster maneuvers” engaged by generations of black leaders, including Tate. In doing so, Siddle-Walker seeks to broaden interpretations of black social and professional networks in provocative ways. Members of these networks weren't tied just to each other but to the cultural values and ideas of their African past.
The second part of the book follows Tate's evolution into the head of the GT&EA, simultaneously detailing the extensive activism of the organization leading up to Brown v. Board of Education. It became clear to Tate early on that GT&EA was leading the organized fight for black educational justice in Georgia, and had for decades. The organization funded litigation battles, made direct appeals to local representatives, and used numerous other strategies to pressure officials to comply with the “separate but equal” clause cast in Plessy v. Ferguson, while still pursuing full integration. The shrewd tactics of black leaders forced local whites to acquiesce to demands for equal funding or else undermine legal segregation's legitimacy, leaving the law vulnerable to contestation by blacks. Siddle-Walker goes on to explicate the depth of the GT&EA's involvement in regional and national networks, describing specific ways the organization supported the efforts of the NAACP. She also recounts GT&EA's fraught relationship with white counterparts represented by the Georgia Education Association (GEA), as well as the National Education Association (NEA), in addition to close collaboration with national African American organizations like the American Teachers Association (ATA) and the National Council of Officers of State Teachers Associations (NCOSTA).
The third part of the book chronicles the costs of integration, including the descent of the GT&EA after the Brown verdict. Tate and others were conflicted between pursuing authentic participation within organizations like the NEA and preserving their own parallel associations. In the book's last chapter, members of the GT&EA, desiring full membership rights and equal representation in leadership positions, voted to merge with the GEA. According to Siddle-Walker the demise of the organization, and others like it across the country, represented a tremendous loss for African Americans. Collective power cultivated within black educator networks was sacrificed at a time when black communities desperately needed protection from the backlash integration produced. Without their advocacy, the mass firing of black teachers and administrators, as well as the hostile schooling environment many black students soon faced, became widespread. Siddle-Walker suggests we are still grappling with the unintended consequences of integration, including a loss of institutional memory. In recovering Tate's story, Siddle-Walker attempts to connect present-day activists to a history robust with tried and true lessons.
Siddle-Walker's failure to interrogate gender disappoints. Aside from occasional references, African American women are largely invisible. Still, glimpses of black women emerge, resisting the monotony of Siddle-Walker's masculinized narrative. Most appear in photographs of GT&EA meetings and events, their names and roles briefly mentioned in adjoining captions. Tate's wife, Virginia, herself a recognized educator, receives a similar treatment, her accolades reduced to a caption late in the book. What role did black women have within the GT&EA and the larger movement for integration? What relationship did Tate and other black male leaders have with women colleagues? Lacking a substantial treatment of gender, Siddle-Walker unintentionally perpetuates myths of black male leadership, and at times descriptions of Tate feel hagiographic.
The Lost Education of Horace Tate offers new terrain for historians to explore and implores researchers to place the work of black educators within larger historical narratives. A fascinating story coupled with rigorous scholarship make for Siddle-Walker's most significant book to date.
