Retired Pittsburgh police officer wins Good Neighbor Award
It wasn’t enough that Brenda Tate, a retired City of Pittsburgh police officer, traveled to West Africa and Germany on mission trips and volunteered in her community while working full time and raising two children.
After the Hill District native, one of the first Black female officers to hit the streets, retired in 2014, she accelerated her volunteer work. Now she is the recipient of the Sister Susan Welsh Good Neighbor Award from McAuley Ministries, Pittsburgh Mercy’s foundation.
The award recognizes good neighbors in the Hill District, Uptown and West Oakland. Tate received $5,000, a bouquet of fresh flowers and an engraved vase in connection with the award. She said she was honored and humbled to receive an award named for Welsh, the former president and CEO of Pittsburgh Mercy and vice chairperson and a founding boardmember of McAuley Ministries.
“This woman was another one who stepped in the gap to fill the need and never thought about it,” Tate said. “When God decides to take me off this earth, I just want the life I’ve lived to speak for me.”
She started an all-girl softball team, organized Black police officers to march in an annual parade, helped a Boy Scout troop when they lost their leader, and brought U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights trailblazer, to speak at Ebenezer Baptist Church in the Hill District.
As a police officer, Tate protected three presidents, Rosa Parks and the Dalai Lama. She loves the Hill District so much that she spent her last two years as a police officer walking the beat in her hometown.
Senior Jazz Connection — popup jazz concerts for Hill District seniors — is a recent example of her innovative work.
“Brenda is a fierce, tireless advocate for the Hill District,” said Marisol Valentin, executive director of McAuley Ministries. “She has dedicated her life to serving her community.”
Why do you do that?
As a child, Tate watched her mother, Bernice Robinson, schlep
a bucket and mop Monday mornings to clean their church, Nazareth Baptist on Wylie Avenue.
“Mama, why do you do that? They don’t pay you,” she said to her mother.
Her mother replied, “I get paid every day when I wake up and see my children and feed them and take care of them and I have my health.”
Tate’s family has a long history of volunteerism and selflessness. Her aunt, Margaret Watson, 102, who lives with her, took seniors shopping and to doctor appointments when she retired and was in better health.
Tate also has helped her family when there was a need: About five years ago, she donated a kidney to her brother, Larry Robinson of Penn Hills.
“You cannot live on this earth if you do not give back to this earth,” she said.
Tate said she hasn’t pursued volunteer opportunities. They came to her.
In the 1970s, she recruited girls from her alma mater, Fifth Avenue High School in the Hill District, for a softball team named OCC for its sponsor, the Ozanam Cultural Centeron Wylie Avenue.
“I could keep them active and off the street,” Tate said.
Heritage Days
She organized carloads of families to go on picnics for OCC games across Allegheny County. The community outings were needed, she said. “Back in the ’70s, my generation didn’t have anything to do but hang out in bars.”
Thesuccess of the team and picnics confirmed her abilities to organize people and events to “do things that were healthyfor the community.”
In the 1990s, she gathered police officers to march in the annual African American Heritage Day Parade. Afterward, she and her husband, Ramon Woods, served dinner to the officers at their home. The event was so popular that Black firefighters eventually joined them for dinner.
She stepped in to help when Boy Scout Troop 59 of Ebenezer Baptist Church, one of the oldest Black troops in the region, fell dormant after a longtime scoutmaster died. Tate became a member of the nonprofit ScoutReach of Boy Scouts of America, which supported minority scout troops, and helped the young men earn their merit badges. She received the Whitney M. Young Jr. Service Award from the Boy Scouts of America for her work.
“I did it because I think Boy Scouts are important,” Tate said.
The year she retired, she became a member of the Pennsylvania State Democratic Committee and still chairs the Allegheny County Democratic Committee Black Caucus,which she started.
Civil rights icon
In creating “Social Justice Sundays” at Ebenezer church, Tate brought John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, to speak to the congregation.
“I felt it was important that we had an African American icon who was important to the civil rights struggles and who we could see and be able to touch,” she said.
In 2014, a group of local women created the Brenda Tate scholarship through the Negro Education Emergency Drive. Since its inception, the NEED fund has awarded nine scholarships of $1,000 or more.
Giving continues to be central to Tate’s life, as she is a paid lifetime member of the NAACP.
Her goddaughter Tonya Ford, of the Hill District, nominated Tate for McAuley Ministries’ Good Neighbor Award.
“No matter where you’re from, what you’ve done and where you are going, she has a special way of connecting people,” Ford said.