When she first arrived in Atlanta in 2002, Dr. Beverly Tatum stepped into a critical role for the success of the City. A life-long educator, Tatum was named President of Spelman College – a leading educational institution for Black women, not only here in Atlanta but around the world.
She brought years of experience with her. She attended Wesleyan University for her undergraduate education in psychology before earning her master’s and doctorate degrees in the field from the University of Michigan. From there, she went on to teach briefly at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Westfield State College in the subjects of Black Studies and psychology in the 1980s. She then landed at Mount Holyoke University in South Hadley, Mass., where she served as a professor and dean of the Psychology department before being appointed interim President of the school.
A brilliant academic, Tatum focused her studies in psychology around the issue of racial inequity and its systemic roots. Naturally, Spelman College, a school founded on the matter of addressing racial inequity, was a perfect fit for her leadership.
Founded in 1881 by Christian missionaries, Spelman College served the critical purpose of educating Black women less than a generation out of enslavement with the goal of these women then going out and educating the communities they came from.
“The idea was that Spelman women would be able to get a quality education and then use it to transform the communities from which they came, and that was the history and role Spelman played locally here in Atlanta and beyond, going as far as Africa,” said Tatum. “A third of the women who graduate from Spelman have remained in Atlanta and are a crucial part of the engine that drives our City. I like to say if you meet a Black woman who is in a leadership role in a corporate or civic setting here, the odds are high that she is a Spelman graduate.”
During her tenure as president, Tatum led…
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