Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar
Barbara Savage presents a powerful and inspiring biography of Merze Tate (1905–1996), a trailblazing Black woman scholar and world traveller.
Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, the bold and irrepressible Merze Tate (1905–1996) refused to limit her intellectual ambitions, despite living in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world”. Against all odds, through her brilliance and hard work Tate earned degrees in international relations from Oxford (1935) and a doctorate in government from Harvard (1941). She then joined the faculty of Howard University, where she taught for three decades of a long life spanning the tumultuous twentieth century.
Tate was one of the few black women academics of her generation and a prolific scholar with a wide range of interests. This book revives and critiques Tate's prolific and prescient body of scholarship, with topics ranging from nuclear arms limitations to race and imperialism in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Her quest for adventure took her on extensive trips throughout Europe, as well as around the world twice, traveling solo with her cameras in hand. Tate credited her success to other women, Black and white, who help her realize her dream of becoming a scholar.
Barbara Savage’s lucid and skilled rendering of Tate’s story is built on more than a decade of research. Tate’s life and work challenge provincial approaches to African American and American history, women's history, the history of education, diplomatic history, and international thought.
Registration required: please sign up here.
Barbara D. Savage is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor Emerita of American Social Thought and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018–19, she was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford. She remains a Distinguished Fellow of the RAI.
Savage has written three books and co-edited two others. Her latest book is Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar (Yale, 2023). An introductory essay on Tate was included in Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (UNC Press, 2015), a collaborative collection co-edited with Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, and Martha S. Jones. Previously, Savage won the Grawemeyer Prize in Religion for Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Harvard University Press, 2008). She is also co-editor of Women and Religion in the African Diaspora (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), a collaborative project led by R. Marie Griffith. Her first book was Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999) which won the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Award for the best book in American history in the period 1916-1966.
