Funding for To The Contrary provided by Her success is actually an extraordinary example and a rare example of interracial cooperation and commitment to this young black woman to make it possible for her to to get to Oxford.

(Music) Hello, I'm Bonnier Erbe'.

Welcome to To the Contrary.

A weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

Throughout history, the accomplishments and impact of women, particularly women of color, have often been overlooked, misattributed or forgot.

For Black History Month, we cast a spotlight on the extraordinary life and legacy of mercy, an unparalleled black woman scholar.

In 1932, Tate became the first African-American woman to attend the University of Oxford.

But there's so much more to her story.

Joining us today is University of Pennsylvania Professor Barbara Savage, whose groundbreaking biography Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar sheds light on Tate's remarkable journey.

Welcome to the show, Professor Savage.

Thank you very much.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Thank you for joining us.

So how did you, as a scholar yourself, get interested in and then so focused on Merze Tate?

I think because her life is so remarkable, as you say, being one of the earliest black women scholars of of the 20th century.

I knew of her vaguely from years of working in at Howard University in the archives, and as a scholar of African-American history, I knew her name, but I actually stumbled into her work.

And that's really what drew me in, is that here was a scholar who explored a wide range of issues, published five books, dozens and dozens of articles.

And I did not know about her.

And I was drawn.

The more I learned about her, both in terms of her, her life and her work, it was plainly clear to me that this was a person who was bold and audacious and brilliant and who found a way to live a very independent life, especially for an African-American woman born at the turn of the century.

So and that's the really the short story about it.

And so the more I learned, the more I wanted to know and the more I came to understand that she still had so much to teach us today.

Well.

Start by, please telling us it was a global journey that she went on.

Please tell us how that started and and how she found life in England versus life in the United States as a as a black woman.

And at the time in the states when there was the she must have come of age as this huge war between former Confederates or children of Confederates were putting up all the statues of of, you know, defeated generals and defeated warriors, which I always wondered as a young person, why the heck are we honoring the losers?

Who does that and didn't find out what the answer was until I studied history.

But she was coming of age at that time, and there was a huge fight to keep the Jim Crow laws in effect and keep African-Americans down.

So please tell me how her life related to that.

Yes, she was born in 1905, and as she would say for all of her life, she was lucky to be born in Michigan and not in Mississippi.

And Mississippi was not a racial utopia, but it was certainly not the same as being born in segregation.

Day to day humiliations and legal and legal, legal and in practice of segregation in that period.

So she was spared the worst of that, but certainly grew up in it and grew up in a segregated society.

She was able to get to Oxford, as you said in the introduction in 1932, to to study international relations.

She was able to get there because of the support of other black women through their Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, to which Vice President Harris is is also a member.

But they had an international study abroad fellowship for their members, and Tate applied and was able to take what was a $1,000 and go with all of this ambition to be able to study and what she thought and what many believed then and now is the greatest university in the world.

And so this is a woman who as a as a child, became engrossed in the idea of being a world traveler just from studying geography and her geography books, but also somehow aspired to be not just not only a teacher, she was trained as a high school history teacher originally, but then she also wanted to be a scholar and wanted to be a professor.

This was a profoundly ambitious goal for some, for any woman of her generation, and particularly for a black woman.

So she was in at Oxford from 1932 to 1935, traveled widely in Europe and was there, I think, able to experience what many African-Americans of her generation experienced, the kind of freedom and privileges of a being an American citizenship that could only be experienced outside of this country at that time with the benefit of that little blue passport.

And so she was able to realize a level of education that was forclosed to her in this country and able to move about a lot more freely than she would have been able and was able to do in the United States.

So the credit for that goes to her ambition, her brilliance, and her refusal to accept no as an answer, as she as she literally plowed her way into all of these opportunities.

Please tell the audience about her family.

Who were her parents?

How did she came from not out of severe poverty.

She was raised in central Michigan and was the daughter and the granddaughter of black homesteaders, that is African-Americans who moved to Michigan in the 1860s from Ohio and Pennsylvania.

And to take advantage of the Homestead Act of 1962, which was, as it sounds, if you got there and you staked a claim and you cleared the land, you were able to acquire land.

So she descended from a community of African-American homesteaders.

And again, being in Michigan and not in Mississippi meant that her family, though farming, were not sharecroppers, what they owned was theirs, and they were able to keep and to end to and to try to live a life not in poverty, but also not in wealth.

But they were self-sufficient and independent, and that meant a great deal to her.

And I think that really did influence her life and her character to have come from that generation of of African-American homesteaders.

It also meant that her grandparents were not themselves enslaved prior generations had been.

So in that way, she also was advantaged and her family was advantaged that they had been able to escape slavery a generation or two before most African-Americans had.

But it's an unusual upbringing.

Rural Central Michigan, not the South, not Chicago or New York.

And in that way, I think that's part of what makes her life so very interesting, is that she doesn't fit the usual categories that we think about for black people and black women at that time.

What was her high school situation like?

How did she come from rural Michigan to be able to go to a high school that would get her into Oxford?

She was a great student and in high school there, she was the only black student in that in that class and in that school, in part because her family was though there were other African Americans in Michigan with whom they were, you know, they were connected.

Her family was one of the few in the area where they lived.

So she was always the only black student.

And that in some ways gave her access to a quality of education that she would not have had.

As I've said before, in southern states.

At some point, the high school that she was to graduate from where she grew up burned down, and so she had to move at 14 by herself to Battle Creek, Michigan, in order to complete high school and then in order to go to to college.

So she was working and boarding as a maid or helping to clean houses and working for room and board.

So she was someone who always worked her way through school in addition to trying to to to being able to be the best student.

And she was always the best student in her classes in high school and later in college.

And so, again, this is a remarkable woman in terms of both intellect and determination.

How did she get herself into Oxford?

I mean, that's.

Going to Oxford in the 1930s at a time when there were very, very few women at Oxford.

And that's a very important thing, I think, to remember.

And of course, fewer Americans still when during the time she was there, she was the only black American in the entire university.

But there was a way for women in the United States to go to Oxford through the and she figured out how to do that.

And then she'd already decided and said she was going to go.

And as I said, it was the fellowship from the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority that provided the money.

But she was only able to go with attestations from White women who had trained her in Michigan or from whom she had worked or with whom she had worked there, and African American women who supported her.

So her her success and I would say this throughout the book and throughout her life, it's actually an extraordinary example and a rare example of interracial cooperation and commitment to this young black woman to make it possible for her to to get to Oxford.

And once she was there, she was welcomed into it's a very small but a very tight knit community of women at Oxford in that period.

And they were very impressed with her, with her with her determination, with her personality, and were very committed to seeing her through.

And so she always credited, she said, older women and women who mentored her with with her success.

And I think from everything I've read in research, she's absolutely right about that.

And that is actually a very heartening thing to think about these days.

That is, you think of of how American white women would have treated a brilliant young black woman in college.

And in those same years you're talking about the thirties.

I mean, not only was England may have been welcoming, but Hitler was beginning to take power in Germany, and there were a lot of European forces working against her.

And there certainly were.

I mean, America was was still a very repressive, if not slavery, which technically ended in 63 with the Emancipation Proclamation.

It was still an extremely repressive environment for all people of color, and most especially black people.

Yes.

And had she not been born in Michigan, she would not have had access to the college education that she had, which was state provided.

It was a state teaching college, most of which of those that were in the South and elsewhere were would have would not would have been foreclosed to all black applicants, including women.

And so in that way, she was very fortunate.

But she's also someone who took advantage of every opportunity that was available to her and then bulldozed her way into places where she had to convince people that she both deserved to be there, you know, could do the work, and that they should give her an opportunity.

And she was not someone who was shy about advancing her own interests or her own needs.

And I admire that about her very much.

And then what field of study did she choose?

And tell me how and tell our audience how it influenced her and and why she chose it and what she did with the degree.

She went to Oxford to study international relations.

She had been in in Europe, actually was not her first trip to England or to Europe.

She had traveled there alone the year before and had gone to Geneva to see the League of Nations in Action, and there learned about international relations.

And the person who was running that program was the Premier professor of international relations at Oxford, and that's why she had decided she wanted to go there and work with her, so with him.

So she was able to deploy this international relations degree eventually into a doctorate from Harvard in 1941 in government or what would now be called political science.

And from that, she then built a career as a scholar of of diplomatic history, international relations, and and built on that.

But it was really the foundation was was her training at Oxford.

You mentioned Nazi Germany and Hitler in the 1930s.

I think one of the most kind of troubling episodes in the book for her, I think for me as her biographer was that when she finished her time at Oxford in 1935, she decided to go to the University of Berlin to work on her German.

She had French and she had German speaking language.

She wanted to work on it more as a research language.

This is a very common thing for Americans to do from Oxford in that period.

And while there, because she was a foreigner and in a school of language, they were they were forced to basically go to go and learn about Nazi-ism while they were there.

And in one excursion, she and the entire class was taken to the sports palace, which we know sadly all too well, where, much to her dismay, Hitler himself appeared.

And this is one of the most kind of chilling episodes in the book because and it's something that she talked about for the rest of her life, because the venom and the hatred was so apparent and they were all chided by the teacher because they refused to stand up and they refused to salute.

But that had been the expectation.

And so when her time in that school, the University of Berlin, and she did get her certificate in German, she was very eager to return to the United States.

Tell us some other and then what career track did she pursue there?

But also, please feel free to insert other anecdotes like that, like watching Hitler give a speech.

Well, I think one of the most interesting things for me is that when she comes back to the United States in 1935, she takes the boat over to New York, comes into port, and then gets on a train to go south where she's has a job waiting for her in North Carolina.

And so she rides a train from New York to Washington, gets off.

And there, of course, one begins to have to ride on the Jim Crow car in 1935.

And so for the first time, she rides a Jim Crow car from Washington south into North Carolina, where she takes a job at Bennett College in Greensboro.

And so for me, the stark contrast between the three years at Oxford and moving about in England and Europe, the kind of haunting experience with Hitler, and then all of a sudden she's living for the first time in the segregated Jim Crow South, and she stays there for four or five years before she before she gets her doctorate at Harvard in 41.

She teaches history.

Bennett is a college for black women, as it was then and is today.

And so... One of only two all women HBCUs, correct?

Spelman College in Atlanta and Bennett in in North Carolina.

And so she was also then particularly interested in questions around how to best educate black women in the 20th century to take on the responsibilities of racial advancement to how they could be best trained to support themselves, but to also still be engaged in the issues of the day, both domestic and internationally.

So she was having her students read The New York Times and debate all the questions that were coming as war was to come and as our entry was to come later on and was a real a real force for encouraging young black women to see themselves as citizens of the world capable but also in a certain kind of way, obligated to pick up the struggle as it had been handed down over the years and as it was handed down to them, to their generation after hers.

And and it was from there that she then left North Carolina with her degree from from Harvard and joined the faculty at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she spent the remainder of her academic career.

And what I say about the time in North Carolina, I think it's really important to remember this is that she moves to Washington and in many ways, having lived in the Jim Crow South was such great preparation for that, because Washington was a southern city.

It was segregated.

African-Americans there were fighting for the basic same sorts of basic things that we associate with the Deep South.

But she was moving into a Washington that was, you know, that was segregated, discriminatory, and also into a city, then as now, of course, does not have voting rights or its own kind of of opportunities.

And so that's how she ended up in Washington and started at Howard in 1942.

I've got to believe, because these stories, or at least a few of them are now coming to the surface and getting the spotlight and the attention that they so richly deserved for so long.

But I think of I was at NBC News in the eighties with the then young producer named A'Lelia Bundles, whose grandmother was... C.J.

Walker.

C.J.

Walker exactly.

Thank you.

And A'Lelia wrote her biography and then got it turned into, I think, a Netflix movie, which was fabulous.

But these women were always there, and there must have been more than a handful of them.

Right?

So there there were and there.

And it wouldn't take one.

It's interesting that you should mention Walker, because the place that she went after she left Michigan and as a high school history teacher, she actually was forced to move to Indianapolis to get a teaching job because the state of Michigan, though they had trained her, was not hiring black high school teachers.

So, ironically, she had to move to Indianapolis in order to to have a job and was then a part of that community that Walker had had had worked so hard to to enrich really thriving black middle class, working class community in Indianapolis.

And it's from there and it's really the first time that she's living in a large community of of black people, of educated black people, of educated black women.

But then she that network is actually a lifelong network for her.

So it's it's high school teachers.

It's college educated black women.

It's her sorority.

It's bridge players, which is one of her was one of her hobbies.

But she learned that also in Indianapolis.

And this is a world that's actually largely invisible to the larger white community, but is a very rich and vibrant nationwide network of educators.

And she never strayed from that.

And that was that was a community that she engaged there.

It was community.

She engaged everywhere she went, and especially in Washington, where she lived until her death in 1996.

So it so it's so it's great that you would that you would mention Walker in Indianapolis and but.

Quickly because we're about out of time but I do want to ask so how many more of these women are there?

How many do you know about who your next books are going to be about?

Are they...?

Well, I think I'll leave the next books to the next generation.

But I can say this, that this is one of the remarkable things for me as someone who has taught African American history for 25 years, this is my third book and I've done lots of other things.

But for me not to know about her and for me not to know about her work and all that she did is just to it's just astounding in certain ways.

But it also presents this extraordinary opportunity for us to continue to learn and to broaden our understanding of African-American history, of women's history, and to just have a great appreciation, even in this day and age, which is a pretty for many of us is a pretty glum time to be, you know, to be alive.

And I say that as someone who lived through the 1960s.

But I feel like we're at another point where we are making decisions about whether we can figure out how to live in a multiracial democracy, that it is encouraging to all of us that there have been worse times and people found a way.

And the most important thing is that we certainly cannot give up and we also cannot give up out of respect to all of those prior generations of African-Americans and those allied with them who fought the fight of their time.

And we must now continue to engage those issues of segregation in different ways, but also of discrimination against African-Americans and particularly against women in general.

Well, Professor Savage, thank you so much.

And thank you for enlightening us to Merze Tate's existence and her accomplishments.

Thank you.

You know, overcoming these insurmountable barriers that would have prevented 99% of all people from getting anywhere.

And we're put there for that very reason.

Again, your book is Merze Tate The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar.

And we really appreciate your time.

Thank you.

So much.

And thank you for the invitation and thanks for all the good work that you do on this show.

Best for you.

Okay.

That's it for this edition.

Keep the conversation going on all our social media platforms and visit our Web site.

pbs.org/tothecontrary And whether you agree or think to the contrary.

See you next week.

(MUSIC) Funding for To the Contrary provided by You're watching PBS.

Funding for To The Contrary provided by Her success is actually an extraordinary example and a rare example of interracial cooperation and commitment to this young black woman to make it possible for her to to get to Oxford.

(Music) Hello, I'm Bonnier Erbe'.

Welcome to To the Contrary.

A weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

Throughout history, the accomplishments and impact of women, particularly women of color, have often been overlooked, misattributed or forgot.

For Black History Month, we cast a spotlight on the extraordinary life and legacy of mercy, an unparalleled black woman scholar.

In 1932, Tate became the first African-American woman to attend the University of Oxford.

But there's so much more to her story.

Joining us today is University of Pennsylvania Professor Barbara Savage, whose groundbreaking biography Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar sheds light on Tate's remarkable journey.

Welcome to the show, Professor Savage.

Thank you very much.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Thank you for joining us.

So how did you, as a scholar yourself, get interested in and then so focused on Merze Tate?

I think because her life is so remarkable, as you say, being one of the earliest black women scholars of of the 20th century.

I knew of her vaguely from years of working in at Howard University in the archives, and as a scholar of African-American history, I knew her name, but I actually stumbled into her work.

And that's really what drew me in, is that here was a scholar who explored a wide range of issues, published five books, dozens and dozens of articles.

And I did not know about her.

And I was drawn.

The more I learned about her, both in terms of her, her life and her work, it was plainly clear to me that this was a person who was bold and audacious and brilliant and who found a way to live a very independent life, especially for an African-American woman born at the turn of the century.

So and that's the really the short story about it.

And so the more I learned, the more I wanted to know and the more I came to understand that she still had so much to teach us today.

Well.

Start by, please telling us it was a global journey that she went on.

Please tell us how that started and and how she found life in England versus life in the United States as a as a black woman.

And at the time in the states when there was the she must have come of age as this huge war between former Confederates or children of Confederates were putting up all the statues of of, you know, defeated generals and defeated warriors, which I always wondered as a young person, why the heck are we honoring the losers?

Who does that and didn't find out what the answer was until I studied history.

But she was coming of age at that time, and there was a huge fight to keep the Jim Crow laws in effect and keep African-Americans down.

So please tell me how her life related to that.

Yes, she was born in 1905, and as she would say for all of her life, she was lucky to be born in Michigan and not in Mississippi.

And Mississippi was not a racial utopia, but it was certainly not the same as being born in segregation.

Day to day humiliations and legal and legal, legal and in practice of segregation in that period.

So she was spared the worst of that, but certainly grew up in it and grew up in a segregated society.

She was able to get to Oxford, as you said in the introduction in 1932, to to study international relations.

She was able to get there because of the support of other black women through their Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, to which Vice President Harris is is also a member.

But they had an international study abroad fellowship for their members, and Tate applied and was able to take what was a $1,000 and go with all of this ambition to be able to study and what she thought and what many believed then and now is the greatest university in the world.

And so this is a woman who as a as a child, became engrossed in the idea of being a world traveler just from studying geography and her geography books, but also somehow aspired to be not just not only a teacher, she was trained as a high school history teacher originally, but then she also wanted to be a scholar and wanted to be a professor.

This was a profoundly ambitious goal for some, for any woman of her generation, and particularly for a black woman.

So she was in at Oxford from 1932 to 1935, traveled widely in Europe and was there, I think, able to experience what many African-Americans of her generation experienced, the kind of freedom and privileges of a being an American citizenship that could only be experienced outside of this country at that time with the benefit of that little blue passport.

And so she was able to realize a level of education that was forclosed to her in this country and able to move about a lot more freely than she would have been able and was able to do in the United States.

So the credit for that goes to her ambition, her brilliance, and her refusal to accept no as an answer, as she as she literally plowed her way into all of these opportunities.

Please tell the audience about her family.

Who were her parents?

How did she came from not out of severe poverty.

She was raised in central Michigan and was the daughter and the granddaughter of black homesteaders, that is African-Americans who moved to Michigan in the 1860s from Ohio and Pennsylvania.

And to take advantage of the Homestead Act of 1962, which was, as it sounds, if you got there and you staked a claim and you cleared the land, you were able to acquire land.

So she descended from a community of African-American homesteaders.

And again, being in Michigan and not in Mississippi meant that her family, though farming, were not sharecroppers, what they owned was theirs, and they were able to keep and to end to and to try to live a life not in poverty, but also not in wealth.

But they were self-sufficient and independent, and that meant a great deal to her.

And I think that really did influence her life and her character to have come from that generation of of African-American homesteaders.

It also meant that her grandparents were not themselves enslaved prior generations had been.

So in that way, she also was advantaged and her family was advantaged that they had been able to escape slavery a generation or two before most African-Americans had.

But it's an unusual upbringing.

Rural Central Michigan, not the South, not Chicago or New York.

And in that way, I think that's part of what makes her life so very interesting, is that she doesn't fit the usual categories that we think about for black people and black women at that time.

What was her high school situation like?

How did she come from rural Michigan to be able to go to a high school that would get her into Oxford?

She was a great student and in high school there, she was the only black student in that in that class and in that school, in part because her family was though there were other African Americans in Michigan with whom they were, you know, they were connected.

Her family was one of the few in the area where they lived.

So she was always the only black student.

And that in some ways gave her access to a quality of education that she would not have had.

As I've said before, in southern states.

At some point, the high school that she was to graduate from where she grew up burned down, and so she had to move at 14 by herself to Battle Creek, Michigan, in order to complete high school and then in order to go to to college.

So she was working and boarding as a maid or helping to clean houses and working for room and board.

So she was someone who always worked her way through school in addition to trying to to to being able to be the best student.

And she was always the best student in her classes in high school and later in college.

And so, again, this is a remarkable woman in terms of both intellect and determination.

How did she get herself into Oxford?

I mean, that's.

Going to Oxford in the 1930s at a time when there were very, very few women at Oxford.

And that's a very important thing, I think, to remember.

And of course, fewer Americans still when during the time she was there, she was the only black American in the entire university.

But there was a way for women in the United States to go to Oxford through the and she figured out how to do that.

And then she'd already decided and said she was going to go.

And as I said, it was the fellowship from the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority that provided the money.

But she was only able to go with attestations from White women who had trained her in Michigan or from whom she had worked or with whom she had worked there, and African American women who supported her.

So her her success and I would say this throughout the book and throughout her life, it's actually an extraordinary example and a rare example of interracial cooperation and commitment to this young black woman to make it possible for her to to get to Oxford.

And once she was there, she was welcomed into it's a very small but a very tight knit community of women at Oxford in that period.

And they were very impressed with her, with her with her determination, with her personality, and were very committed to seeing her through.

And so she always credited, she said, older women and women who mentored her with with her success.

And I think from everything I've read in research, she's absolutely right about that.

And that is actually a very heartening thing to think about these days.

That is, you think of of how American white women would have treated a brilliant young black woman in college.

And in those same years you're talking about the thirties.

I mean, not only was England may have been welcoming, but Hitler was beginning to take power in Germany, and there were a lot of European forces working against her.

And there certainly were.

I mean, America was was still a very repressive, if not slavery, which technically ended in 63 with the Emancipation Proclamation.

It was still an extremely repressive environment for all people of color, and most especially black people.

Yes.

And had she not been born in Michigan, she would not have had access to the college education that she had, which was state provided.

It was a state teaching college, most of which of those that were in the South and elsewhere were would have would not would have been foreclosed to all black applicants, including women.

And so in that way, she was very fortunate.

But she's also someone who took advantage of every opportunity that was available to her and then bulldozed her way into places where she had to convince people that she both deserved to be there, you know, could do the work, and that they should give her an opportunity.

And she was not someone who was shy about advancing her own interests or her own needs.

And I admire that about her very much.

And then what field of study did she choose?

And tell me how and tell our audience how it influenced her and and why she chose it and what she did with the degree.

She went to Oxford to study international relations.

She had been in in Europe, actually was not her first trip to England or to Europe.

She had traveled there alone the year before and had gone to Geneva to see the League of Nations in Action, and there learned about international relations.

And the person who was running that program was the Premier professor of international relations at Oxford, and that's why she had decided she wanted to go there and work with her, so with him.

So she was able to deploy this international relations degree eventually into a doctorate from Harvard in 1941 in government or what would now be called political science.

And from that, she then built a career as a scholar of of diplomatic history, international relations, and and built on that.

But it was really the foundation was was her training at Oxford.

You mentioned Nazi Germany and Hitler in the 1930s.

I think one of the most kind of troubling episodes in the book for her, I think for me as her biographer was that when she finished her time at Oxford in 1935, she decided to go to the University of Berlin to work on her German.

She had French and she had German speaking language.

She wanted to work on it more as a research language.

This is a very common thing for Americans to do from Oxford in that period.

And while there, because she was a foreigner and in a school of language, they were they were forced to basically go to go and learn about Nazi-ism while they were there.

And in one excursion, she and the entire class was taken to the sports palace, which we know sadly all too well, where, much to her dismay, Hitler himself appeared.

And this is one of the most kind of chilling episodes in the book because and it's something that she talked about for the rest of her life, because the venom and the hatred was so apparent and they were all chided by the teacher because they refused to stand up and they refused to salute.

But that had been the expectation.

And so when her time in that school, the University of Berlin, and she did get her certificate in German, she was very eager to return to the United States.

Tell us some other and then what career track did she pursue there?

But also, please feel free to insert other anecdotes like that, like watching Hitler give a speech.

Well, I think one of the most interesting things for me is that when she comes back to the United States in 1935, she takes the boat over to New York, comes into port, and then gets on a train to go south where she's has a job waiting for her in North Carolina.

And so she rides a train from New York to Washington, gets off.

And there, of course, one begins to have to ride on the Jim Crow car in 1935.

And so for the first time, she rides a Jim Crow car from Washington south into North Carolina, where she takes a job at Bennett College in Greensboro.

And so for me, the stark contrast between the three years at Oxford and moving about in England and Europe, the kind of haunting experience with Hitler, and then all of a sudden she's living for the first time in the segregated Jim Crow South, and she stays there for four or five years before she before she gets her doctorate at Harvard in 41.

She teaches history.

Bennett is a college for black women, as it was then and is today.

And so... One of only two all women HBCUs, correct?

Spelman College in Atlanta and Bennett in in North Carolina.

And so she was also then particularly interested in questions around how to best educate black women in the 20th century to take on the responsibilities of racial advancement to how they could be best trained to support themselves, but to also still be engaged in the issues of the day, both domestic and internationally.

So she was having her students read The New York Times and debate all the questions that were coming as war was to come and as our entry was to come later on and was a real a real force for encouraging young black women to see themselves as citizens of the world capable but also in a certain kind of way, obligated to pick up the struggle as it had been handed down over the years and as it was handed down to them, to their generation after hers.

And and it was from there that she then left North Carolina with her degree from from Harvard and joined the faculty at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she spent the remainder of her academic career.

And what I say about the time in North Carolina, I think it's really important to remember this is that she moves to Washington and in many ways, having lived in the Jim Crow South was such great preparation for that, because Washington was a southern city.

It was segregated.

African-Americans there were fighting for the basic same sorts of basic things that we associate with the Deep South.

But she was moving into a Washington that was, you know, that was segregated, discriminatory, and also into a city, then as now, of course, does not have voting rights or its own kind of of opportunities.

And so that's how she ended up in Washington and started at Howard in 1942.

I've got to believe, because these stories, or at least a few of them are now coming to the surface and getting the spotlight and the attention that they so richly deserved for so long.

But I think of I was at NBC News in the eighties with the then young producer named A'Lelia Bundles, whose grandmother was... C.J.

Walker.

C.J.

Walker exactly.

Thank you.

And A'Lelia wrote her biography and then got it turned into, I think, a Netflix movie, which was fabulous.

But these women were always there, and there must have been more than a handful of them.

Right?

So there there were and there.

And it wouldn't take one.

It's interesting that you should mention Walker, because the place that she went after she left Michigan and as a high school history teacher, she actually was forced to move to Indianapolis to get a teaching job because the state of Michigan, though they had trained her, was not hiring black high school teachers.

So, ironically, she had to move to Indianapolis in order to to have a job and was then a part of that community that Walker had had had worked so hard to to enrich really thriving black middle class, working class community in Indianapolis.

And it's from there and it's really the first time that she's living in a large community of of black people, of educated black people, of educated black women.

But then she that network is actually a lifelong network for her.

So it's it's high school teachers.

It's college educated black women.

It's her sorority.

It's bridge players, which is one of her was one of her hobbies.

But she learned that also in Indianapolis.

And this is a world that's actually largely invisible to the larger white community, but is a very rich and vibrant nationwide network of educators.

And she never strayed from that.

And that was that was a community that she engaged there.

It was community.

She engaged everywhere she went, and especially in Washington, where she lived until her death in 1996.

So it so it's so it's great that you would that you would mention Walker in Indianapolis and but.

Quickly because we're about out of time but I do want to ask so how many more of these women are there?

How many do you know about who your next books are going to be about?

Are they...?

Well, I think I'll leave the next books to the next generation.

But I can say this, that this is one of the remarkable things for me as someone who has taught African American history for 25 years, this is my third book and I've done lots of other things.

But for me not to know about her and for me not to know about her work and all that she did is just to it's just astounding in certain ways.

But it also presents this extraordinary opportunity for us to continue to learn and to broaden our understanding of African-American history, of women's history, and to just have a great appreciation, even in this day and age, which is a pretty for many of us is a pretty glum time to be, you know, to be alive.

And I say that as someone who lived through the 1960s.

But I feel like we're at another point where we are making decisions about whether we can figure out how to live in a multiracial democracy, that it is encouraging to all of us that there have been worse times and people found a way.

And the most important thing is that we certainly cannot give up and we also cannot give up out of respect to all of those prior generations of African-Americans and those allied with them who fought the fight of their time.

And we must now continue to engage those issues of segregation in different ways, but also of discrimination against African-Americans and particularly against women in general.

Well, Professor Savage, thank you so much.

And thank you for enlightening us to Merze Tate's existence and her accomplishments.

Thank you.

You know, overcoming these insurmountable barriers that would have prevented 99% of all people from getting anywhere.

And we're put there for that very reason.

Again, your book is Merze Tate The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar.

And we really appreciate your time.

Thank you.

So much.

And thank you for the invitation and thanks for all the good work that you do on this show.

Best for you.

Okay.

That's it for this edition.

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