An older woman and man standing beside a younger woman smiling at the camera.

For Ercell Tate, the phrase “pay it forward” is more than a platitude. It’s personal. As a Black man entering the Wake Forest PA program in 1971, Tate faced a number of obstacles to graduating and entering practice.

Thankfully, Tate had a cadre of supporters at Wake Forest who went out of their way to help him overcome those barriers and chart a fifty-year career in medicine.

Now retired, Tate is focused on repaying the support of his colleagues and mentors by ensuring young, Black students have the resources and support they need to thrive.

Uphill Battle

After Tate returned home from the Vietnam war in 1971, his supervisors were eager for him to re-enlist in the military. Upon realizing Tate was disinterested in returning to combat, they instead implored him to go to PA school.

Though he was eager to pursue an education, Tate understood it would be difficult finding an institution that would accept a married Black man with two children. Thankfully, the Wake Forest PA program offered him a spot in their program.

However, another barrier presented itself. The financial and emotional stress of being a full-time, unemployed student and father jeopardized Tate’s ability to pursue his education. This tumult brought him to the precipice of dropping out before his advisor, Dr. Katherine Anderson, stepped in. She found Tate’s wife a job at Baptist Hospital and secured his family off-campus housing. This advocacy was instrumental in enabling Tate to become one of Wake Forest PA program’s Black graduates.

“From then on, it’s been Wake in my corner,” Tate recalls. “I always thought, ‘Whenever the opportunity came around for us to repay them or pay it forward, we were going to do all we could to repay what Wake had done for us.’”

After graduating, Tate was able to leverage his skills into a highly successful career. After nearly two decades as a PA and helping co-found the AAPA, Tate transitioned to a sales role with 3M where he was a top performer for 25 years.

Helping Black Students Succeed

Even during his tenure as a student, it was clear to Tate that the PA field did not cater to the Black community. Today, he cites a lack of representation as a core factor in the field’s continued inability to provide quality healthcare to Black patients.

“When I was in the PA program, I was the only Black student in my class. Since then, there hasn’t been much diversification,” Tate says. “There needs to be more people that Black patients can look at that look like them, that can identify with what they’re going through.”

As years passed, Tate realized he had an opportunity to repay the support of his mentors and facilitate the empathy-based care he longed to see in the field. Eventually, these thoughts led to him and his wife establishing the Ercell A. and Linda W. Tate PA Scholarship.

Its inaugural scholar, Tiara Good-Greene, was selected in 2021. “Tiara is married and has two kids, so we knew what she was going through,” Tate says. “Anything we could do to make life easier for her, we were glad to do.”

When asked about her scholarship and what the Tate’s support meant to her, Good-Greene replied, “Anything I’m able to do in representation of (the Tates) is going to be great.”

Greater Standard of Care

Though only in its second year, the scholarship set up by Tate is already empowering Black PAs to succeed. However, Tate is quick to articulate a greater value in having more Black students in Wake Forest’s program than just increasing representation. Instead, he posits that greater diversity allows those students’ peers to provide better, more compassionate care for future patients.

“I think a lot of the interactions that Black students and students of different racial backgrounds can bring to each other will give them an opportunity to identify with the different people that they're going to be seeing in their different practices,” Tate says.

Tate is looking forward to seeing how the scholarship’s 2022 recipient, John Mingo, helps carry the scholarship’s legacy forward. Mingo had an opportunity to meet the Tates and thank them for their generous gift, “It was such an honor and joy to meet Mr. and Mrs. Tate. Their wealth of medical knowledge and life experience is an inspiration and asset to us all,” Mingo said.

With his scholarship undergirding their education, Tate is hopeful that Mingo, Good-Greene, and all future recipients will continue stewarding a diverse environment at Wake Forest that ensures all of its students are equipped to provide world-class care to patients from all walks of life.