Penfield Tate II: Boulder’s First Black Mayor and Gay Rights Advocate

Author’s Note: Throughout this article, there are references to both racist and homophobic encounters experienced by Penfield Tate II. All of these references are from quotes made by Tate in a 1974 interview. Reader discretion is advised.

When elected to the Boulder City Council in 1971, Penfield Wallace Tate II stood out. Not only was he elected as a liberal in a city still hesitant to progressive causes, he was a Black man in an overwhelmingly white city. Tate frequently wore bright colored beads to cement his visual power, also donning a curled handlebar moustache.

Tate was a humanitarian, using his political leverage to advocate for civil rights causes, even at the demise of his electoral ambitions.

Born in New Philadelphia, Ohio, Tate’s younger years were relatively quiet, as the family moved around the country for his father’s career. Upon graduating high school in 1949, Tate received a full-ride football scholarship to Kent State University, with the ambitions of later becoming a lawyer. In this pursuit of higher education, Tate described his father as the primary advocate for obtaining a degree. Despite racial barriers for entering college— even higher for securing a job—Tate adopted his father’s mantra that education was a key to personal success and comfort.

However, before he obtained his law degree, Tate served in the United States Army. While there, discrimination ran rampant, irrespective of dismantled legal barriers. 

In one instance, Tate’s commander assigned him to oversee a Chicago housing site. Upon arrival, though, Tate found that he could supervise the site, though not live there himself, as racial hostilities in that community prevented Tate from comfortably establishing a home. Instead, Tate’s family stayed in a nearby hotel, depleting their savings. After multiple similar racially charged events like this, Tate left the forces to fulfill his law aspirations.

How Tate later came to the University of Colorado Boulder’s Law School was by accident. Having decided to attend Boston University in 1967, one weekend Tate set out to visit that college by plane, with a layover in Colorado Springs, Colorado. 

Reflecting on this weekend, Tate said, “I never had been in Colorado before. I had never set foot in the place in my life. [When I got here, some people said], ‘Since you’re going to be here, there’s a couple of law schools in Colorado, one in Denver and one in Boulder at the University of Colorado. Why don’t you just go up there and look around?’”

With an empty weekend ahead of him, Tate rented a car to explore. By the end of that weekend, Tate committed to CU Boulder’s law school. “Where the hell is Boulder?” his wife Ellen asked when informed of the news. (A 2001 interview with Ellen Tate can be found here, reflecting on her experiences as a Black woman in Boulder.)

Tate liked what Colorado had to offer, especially the temperate weather, yet there was also a notable absence of Black representation in the state. For his children, their interactions with other Black children were limited throughout their youth, something Tate described as a conscious concern and risk for himself and his wife. 

When his children came home from school, they recounted their hostile interactions with white classmates. “All the kids in nursery school are telling me that to be pretty, your skin’s got to be white,” Tate recounted one of his daughters saying. 

Tate also described the Black community of Boulder as small, with their representation in city government nil, and broader community support minimal. In his law class at CU, he was the only Black student, with only a few other Black students in levels below him. It was this understanding of his community that drove Tate to more political involvement, as he went on to complete his law degree. After earning that degree in 1968, Tate worked in the administration at Colorado State University as Director of Human Relations.

In 1971, Tate made the leap for elected office, running for a Boulder City Council position. In that year, five seats were up for elections, with voters ousting four incumbents in favor of a younger, more diverse group of candidates. Tate was one of the victorious, securing the most votes of any other candidate. 

In his campaign for city council, Tate ran not as a radical, but as someone eager to help the people of Boulder in their day-to-day lives. From plowing the streets to city maintenance, Tate wanted to better the daily needs of Boulderities. It was at this same moment in the early 1970s, though, that Boulder was awash in anti-Vietnam War sentiments. Tate was also opposed to the war, having left the military because of it, and his political views matched the zeitgeist.

Tate was the first Black council member in Boulder, and the first Black person to have ever run in the city. His cohort of new councilmembers included hippie-personified Tim Fuller, student activist Karen Paget and environmentalist Ken Wright. Their collective elections represented a shift in values of city voters, who sought a more left-of-center approach.

Despite the outward transformation of the City Council’s face, its affairs remained as they had before: housing, infrastructure, sales taxes all of top priority. 

However, there was anger about this shift in methods for enacting government change. According to Paget in a December 2020 interview, as the 1971 body was sworn-in, the then city manager was irate. The city manager canceled the traditional champagne gathering and photo-shoot, making this council session one of the few without a group photo.

Tate, however, was unfazed. As a general member of the council, he worked with his colleagues to craft measures, with varying success considering the conservative counterweight, and Tate’s people skills pulled off.

With elections in 1973, expanding the liberal presence on the council, Tate was selected to be mayor come 1974 by his fellow council members. It was these same councilmembers who dubbed Tate as “the great late Tate,” with the new mayor frequently tardy to appointments as he also managed his own law firm in Denver.

When he became mayor, Tate described his city as “a town that has a lot of people who are concerned about what happens to it. You know, Boulder will never drift in a direction. When it goes places, it goes deliberately. I can’t say that I’m always pleased at where it’s going, but it’s always moving deliberately. And it’s because the people who live there really give a damn about the city and they make their thoughts and their desires and their needs known. I think that’s a good kind of a city to be involved in.”

The good fortunes of Tate’s mayoralty were quickly hampered. With conservatives in Boulder already frustrated by the political shift to the left on the city council, they sought for any way to tear down the now liberal majority. 

At the end of 1973 and into 1974, conservatives found their perfect opportunity: an amendment to the city’s Human Rights Ordinance that sought to bar discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. If enacted, discrimination in housing and employment would become illegal in Boulder, as already accommodated for traits like race, gender and creed. This amendment was known as the Sexual Preference Amendment. 

In this period, the gay rights movement of the United States was in its infancy, with little national structure, much less local political organization. Though events like the Stonewall Riots had sparked national consciousness to the needs of gay, lesbian and bisexual people, there was still a novelty to queer political activism. 

The Boulder Gay Liberation Front, for example, served as a social support group for Boulder’s gay and lesbian denizens, though had little appetite to emerge from the closet and onto the political stage. Meanwhile, conservatives saw the growing movement for gay rights as an opportunity to rescue their own power, even at the expense of historically marginalized people.

As buzz grew about the Sexual Preference Amendment, city council hearings transformed from mundane evenings to lively and stressful affairs. In February 1974, one meeting became so packed, some attendees had to watch the hearing on TV from the lobby of the Boulder municipal building.