Ella Gaines Yates

News Obituary Article

Ella Yates, first black Atlanta library director

By DERRICK HENRY

Ella Yates' five-year tenure as the first black director of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library was packed with challenges, but enormously productive.

She took over in summer 1976 after four years on the staff. Under her leadership, the library built its central branch on Margaret Mitchell Square downtown.

Mrs. Yates saw the state-of-the-art facility through its planning and construction stages and presided at the May 1980 dedication ceremonies. Few details escaped her. She was so concerned about the city receiving a fair deal that she found time to earn a doctoral degree from Atlanta Law School in 1979 so she could understand the contracts.

"Ella wanted to be on top of everything," said former city librarian Hilda O. Morrison of Atlanta.

"She didn't want anyone to pull the wool over her eyes as far as those contracts," said her daughter, Jerri Sydnor-Lee of Atlanta. "She wanted that library to be perfect."

Mrs. Yates cared about much more than an impressive building. She expanded library services for the disabled, ethnic groups and prisoners. She brought the library into the Fulton County Jail, making the jail the first penal institution in the country with a public library branch.

For her efforts she won the city employees' Phoenix Award for 1980.

"I admired her because she had a lot of style and dignity, was very supportive, very meticulous and so knowledgeable," said Ms. Morrison, a librarian with the city from 1972 to 1991. "You couldn't bring up a topic that she couldn't go toe-to-toe with you on it."

Ella Gaines Yates, 79, of Atlanta, died Tuesday of lung cancer at Hospice Atlanta. The funeral was Saturday. Carl M. Williams Funeral Directors was in charge of arrangements.

Mrs. Yates' leadership was not without controversy. In the fall of 1979 the library's board of trustees voted to put her on a six-month probationary period, warning her to delegate more authority and keep in closer contact with the board regarding library operations.

Several months later, after the board's makeup changed, the new board lifted the probationary period without further reprimand.

The Atlanta native was a Spelman College graduate and earned a master's in library science from Atlanta University in 1951. Her career brought her to the Brooklyn Public Library in New York and several libraries in New Jersey before she joined the Atlanta Public Library staff as an assistant director in 1972.

It took a romance to drag her away from Atlanta and the library system she loved.

Mrs. Yates left her position in May 1981 to join her then-husband Clayton R. Yates, an engineer for the Port of Seattle in Washington. The couple had married that January.

Mrs. Yates became a research writer for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in 1982. She investigated fishing rights in Alaska, police brutality in Oregon, equal opportunity employment in Washington and Indian rights in Idaho.

Mrs. Yates returned briefly to Atlanta in 1984. The next year, the governor of Virginia appointed her as state librarian, a post she held for five years.

She came back to Atlanta in 1991.

In May 1998, when Julie Hunter resigned as director of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, tired of her battles with the board of trustees, Mrs. Yates was tapped to be her interim replacement. Mrs. Yates resigned for the same reasons before the year was over.

"When the [library] board became black, there was a backlash to when the board was majority white," recalled Mrs. Yates in a 2004 Atlanta Journal-Constitution story.

Mrs. Yates said she wanted nothing to do with the racial divisiveness. "I am not running a black library or a white library," she said in 1998. "We are here to serve the people.

Around 2000, her daughter said, the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Clark Atlanta University hired Mrs. Yates as interim director. She retired after a year and a half, devoting her time to bridge, gardening, watching classic movies --- Bette Davis was her favorite actress --- and reading, especially biographies.

She could polish off most books in one night, her daughter said, and belonged to the Inquirers Club, one of the oldest literary clubs in the nation.

Her daughter is the only immediate survivor.

© 2006 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution