Brenda Tate spent more than 40 years in law enforcement: five with the Housing Authority Police and another 40 as a Pittsburgh Bureau of Police officer. Tate’s new memoir, Journal of a Black Woman in Blue, recounts her experiences as an alcoholic and narcotic-addicted cop on the beat.
“I started off writing about being an African American policewoman,” says Tate. “I wanted to talk about my community, and when I started talking about my community, these other visions started popping in.”
Tate’s community will be a familiar place to many older yinzers: bars, numbers stations, and poverty. It’s also a place where families like Tate’s struggled to raise children and make a living in a city infamous for throwing up roadblocks to Black residents, especially women.
“I grew up in Pittsburgh’s historic Hill District in the 1950s and early ’60s, and I have lived here all my life,” Tate’s book begins. The book is a different take on the Hill District during the civil rights era and afterwards.
Tate grew up in a home where her mother struggled to make ends meet while her father disappeared into the neighborhood’s bars and brothels, sometimes for hours, other times for days and weeks. A union worker, Tate’s father died in 1964 at age 48. He left the family with a depleted pension fund — as in empty — and pathologies that would take decades to repair.
“That day was the worst day of my life,” Tate writes of his passing. After the funeral, she joined family members in a Herron Avenue bar, one of her father’s favorites, where the bartender offered the teenager a drink. “This was my first drink in a bar. I was 15 years old, and the experience would change my life forever.”
The 630 Bar was a Hill District favorite, along with Lou’s Ringside Bar and the Black Beauty Lounge on Centre Avenue. Vann’s Bar on Webster Avenue provides the setting for much of Tate’s memoir.
Characters in Tate’s book, like “Mr. Jackson the Ragman,” who ran a numbers station inside his Rowley Street store, and “Cigar Annie the Wannabe Gangster,” seem too colorful to be true. Yet, Pittsburgh’s newspaper archives and criminal court records make them plausibly anonymized real-life figures.
Nothing is off limits in Tate’s book. She recounts in stomach-churning detail the many episodes of sexual abuse she survived, from her mother’s male friends to her own partners.
“The first male friend I remember my mother having was Mr. Gump, who lived around the corner and spoke with a strange accent,” Tate wrote in Journal. Tate’s mother would send her to the man’s apartment to borrow money. “The first time he molested me, I had no expectation that he would do anything except give me the money.”
The environment followed Tate into adulthood, and she self-medicated. Alcohol, and later cocaine, took the edge off. Whether it was abusive men or the racist and misogynist cops who were her peers and supervisors, a chemical escape was never far away: bars on her beats where she could duck in for a quick drink or score some coke, and even her own Hill District home, which she once turned into a beer garden for on-duty cops.
“I always left the back door open so that officers could park behind my house and have access any time to my Beer Meister,” Tate wrote in Journal. Tate, who walked a beat in the Hill District’s Zone 2, joked that her house had become known as “Zone Two and a Half.”
Tate wasn’t the first Pittsburgh cop to struggle with alcohol and drug abuse. But by the time she became a cop in 1979, she was in the minority of Black women in uniform. As a Black woman, she entered the force with two strikes against her.
“You have to remember this was a white-male-dominated time,” says Tate. “They were used to protecting and interacting with the white male. If there was a white male with a drinking problem, they knew how to handle him. That was one of their boys.”
Tate’s gender and race left her vulnerable to hazing and abuse. In the book, she recounts one episode when she was walking a beat on Mt. Washington. When she asked her sergeant for a radio, he told her there were none left. Unable to answer calls from the station, she got a three-day suspension for leaving the station without a radio.
Tate took the multiple attempts to sabotage her career in stride.
“People in my community respected me as a black officer … when I put my uniform on,” she says. “I kind of knew what I was and who I was, even through the haze of the alcoholism. It was something that I was raised with, being an African American woman.”
After hitting rock bottom, Tate entered rehab. In recovery, she got certified as a counselor and worked with other alcoholic and addicted women police officers to get them help by founding a women’s recovery program. Tate later got assigned to the police department’s Witness Protection Program, and she was assigned to protective details for visiting dignitaries, including presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. She also protected the Dalai Lama and Rosa Parks while they were in Pittsburgh.
Tate retired in 2014 and turned to community service. In 2022, she founded the Senior Jazz Connection. It meets at the Blakey Center and connects seniors with local jazz artists. Before that, she had organized jazz sessions at the Centre Avenue YMCA.
In 2023, WQED featured Tate’s story in a short documentary, Brenda Tate: Making a Difference. Tate’s book came out in 2024. Her memoir does double duty: it’s a long apology and a vehicle to explain her complicated life to her two sons, and it’s a window into Pittsburgh Black history that’s quickly closing.
“I think there’s so many of us that are still alive, that are so much part of the African American history in this city, that sometimes they go unnoticed,” says Tate. “We all have a story, especially the ones 70 and over.”
This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2025.
