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Soror Hortense Ridley Tate
Hortense Tate, 104, Montclair activist
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
BY GEORGE BERKIN
Star-Ledger Staff
For its Fourth of July parade in 1999, Montclair tapped Hortense Ridley Tate, a best-loved daughter of the township who gave her heart and most of her life to serving its citizens, to lead the celebration as grand marshal.
Arriving in town as a young woman, Mrs. Tate had made Montclair her home for nearly 80 years. And four months before the parade, Mrs. Tate turned 100. Seated in a car for the parade, she waved to the crowds, her enthusiasm undiminished by age.
"She saw herself as just Mrs. Montclair," said her grandson, Herbert Tate, a former Essex County prosecutor.
Mrs. Tate, who overcame a legacy of segregation to become a teacher, YWCA leader and community activist, died Sunday. She was 104.
A resident of the Brighton Gardens-Sunrise assisted living facility in West Orange since 2000, Mrs. Tate was hospitalized at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston for six weeks after she broke a hip. She died of heart and blood problems, her grandson said.
The granddaughter of a freed slave, Mrs. Tate arrived in New Jersey from Topeka, Kan., in 1921 to take a job with a newly opened YWCA.
Mrs. Tate fell in love with Montclair from the time she first heard the township's name.
"It sounds so romantic. Mont-claaairrr, Montclaaairr," Mrs. Tate told a Star-Ledger reporter four years ago, rolling out the syllables. "Doesn't it sound beautiful?"
Mrs. Tate's journey to Montclair was one of overcoming numerous obstacles.
Mrs. Tate was born prematurely on March 9, 1899. She was the second of three daughters born to Ezekiel and Mary Ridley.
Her parents were educators, and she acquired a love for education at an early age. Her father was an elementary school principal in Topeka and her mother, after retiring from the classroom, was a homemaker.
In a recent interview, Mrs. Tate recalled her parents guiding the family as a well-tuned enterprise. "I had a very, very comfortable home," she recalled. "We were a family corporation. My father was the president, my mother was the secretary and we (the children) were the members of the board."
Because of her father's position, Mrs. Tate was able to attend an all-white school. But she soon encountered the sting of racism, as some teachers refused to call on her, her grandson said.
As a young woman of 20, Mrs. Tate, a 1920 graduate of Washburn University in Topeka, set out for a job interview in Kansas City accompanied by her mother.
The job, which she accepted on the romance of the name and the adventure of it all, was a position at a recently opened YWCA in Montclair.
That Y, run for African-American women, had been founded a decade earlier to serve as an alternative to the township's other YM-YWCA, which was segregated.
In her new post as cultural director, she mentored scores of young women, her grandson said. She led hikes, taught the Bible and brought in speakers from the Harlem Renaissance.
"My grandmother saw the good in everybody," Herbert Tate said. "She had a strong faith in God, and lived by his ordinances."
She also taught her young charges African-American history and pride in that history.
"At that time in Montclair," she said later, "nobody, black or white, knew black history ... I was into black history before it became popular. I was raised that way."
In 1928, Mrs. Tate married Alfred Harrison Tate of Montclair and became a mother to his children from a previous marriage.
Mrs. Tate also found herself drawn to the public schools. As she began work at the Glenfield School, a junior high school in Montclair, she found herself confronted with unruly students, her grandson said.
"Kids were throwing things, and she told them, the president of the board of education was coming, and how would they like the president of the board of education to see their house like that," Tate said. The students straightened up.
She next taught at Robert Treat Junior High School in Newark, where she rose to head of the guidance department. Among her colleagues there was Donald Payne, a teacher who became congressman.
Decades later, while in her 80s, Mrs. Tate continued teaching, instructing teenage girls who were unable to attend school and helping them earn their high school equivalency certificates.
Mrs. Tate also applied her community spirit to foster activism. A founding member of the National Council for Negro Women, an organization begun in 1935, she was also active in the Montclair Human Relations Council and the League of Women Voters.
She was also an active member of St. Mark's United Methodist Church in Montclair since shortly after moving to the township.
In 1992, she received the Sojourner Truth Award, the highest honor awarded by the Minority Business Women Council.
In addition to her grandson, Mrs. Tate is survived by a goddaughter, Alice LaTouche of Riverside, Calif.
Last edited by AKA2D '91; 09-10-2003 at 06:38 PM.
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104....WOW!
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