Merze Tate

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. 

Vernie Merze Tate was born in Blanchard, Michigan on February 6, 1905, to Charles and Myrtle Tate, both of whom were the children of free Black homesteaders. Merze had three older half siblings from her mother's first marriage, and her younger brother would be born two years after her. When fire destroyed the small local high school, Tate moved 100 miles away to attend high school in Battle Creek, Michigan, at age 15, working for white families in exchange for a place to live. After graduating high school with a straight A record, and winning the Hinman Oratorical Contest, Tate began college at Western State Normal School in Kalamazoo, which was later renamed Western Michigan University. Overcoming illness that may have been due to overwork, and with financial help from both her sister Thelma and the Black Women's Club back in Battle Creek, Tate graduated from Western in 1927, the first Black student to earn a bachelor's degree there. The college expected to easily place the student with the highest academic record ever earned at the school to that point, but no high school in Michigan would hire a Black teacher. So Tate took a job at the all Black Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis, the city whose population at the time was 12% African American. There, Tate experienced Black intellectual community for the first time, and she took advantage of it, hosting gatherings, lecturing at the YWCA, playing bridge, and joining the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. In the summers, Tate traveled to New York City to earn her master's degree at the Teachers College at Columbia University. In the summer of 1931, Tate took her first of many trips abroad, studying in Switzerland and touring Europe. After five years at Crispus Attucks, Tate left to study at Oxford University, supported by a fellowship from her sorority. She earned a graduate degree in International Relations at Oxford in 1935. Upon returning to the US, Tate taught history at a few different historically Black colleges, before earning a PhD in Government and International Relations from Harvard University's Radcliffe College in June, 1941, the first African American woman to do so. On the day Tate was awarded her doctorate, she was also inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. In Fall, 1942, Tate began what was meant to be a temporary teaching assignment at Howard University, one that would lead to a permanent position, and she stayed there for decades. She was the first Black woman to teach in the History Department at Howard, and at the time, the only Black woman in the entire Social Sciences Division. Tate's first book, "The Disarmament Illusion: The Movement for a Limitation of Armaments to 1907," was based on her doctoral dissertation, and was published by Macmillan in 1942. The work was well reviewed, including by leading international relations scholar Hans Morgenthau. During World War II, Tate became a kind of unofficial coordinator for a group of Black engineers, doctors and dentists, who had trained for military service at Howard, and who had dubbed themselves the Prometheans. Throughout the war, they kept in contact with her and she produced a newsletter to keep them abreast of each other. In 1948, Tate published her second book, "The United States and Armaments," with Harvard University Press, which expanded her earlier work beyond 1907. That same year, Tate was invited to be one of three American representatives at a six week UNESCO summer seminar, where she joined representatives from 26 other countries, in producing teaching materials about the United Nations. Tate's resulting 30 page paper, "The International Control of Atomic Energy: A Vital Problem," was published as a UNESCO pamphlet. In 1950, Tate was an early recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, giving her the opportunity to teach at Visva-Bharati University in rural India. On the way to and from India, Tate travelled extensively throughout Europe and Asia. Her final stop on her way back to the mainland United States was in Hawaii, which sparked her scholarly interest. Tate's next two books focused on Hawaii. In 1965, she published, "The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom: A Political History," with Yale University Press. And in 1968, she published, "Hawaii: Reciprocity or Annexation," with Michigan University Press. Tate had trouble finding publishers, both for work on Australia and New Zealand, and for a work of historical fiction on King Kamehameha IV of Hawaii, but she did publish one additional book with Howard University Press in 1973, a collection of her essays, titled, "Diplomacy in the Pacific." Also in 1973, Tate took a long awaited trip to Africa, traveling extensively on the continent, including to Liberia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and controversially to Rhodesia. She returned to Africa a few years later, for another long trip after her retirement from Howard. At the end of that trip, Tate was invited to serve as an advisor to the Black Women Oral History Project, through the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. She ended up not just advising the project, but also conducting interviews and sitting for a series of interviews of her. Merze Tate died on June 27, 1996, at the age of 91, in Washington, DC. Having outlived her entire family, Tate had arranged in advance to have her body flown back to Michigan, where she was buried near her birthplace, in Blanchard, Michigan. Tate, who had been quietly successful in stock market investments, left much of her fortune to her beloved alma mater, Western Michigan University, along with smaller gifts to Radcliffe and Howard. In 2021, Western Michigan University honored Tate by renaming University College, the academic home for exploratory majors, after Tate. According to its website, "As a first generation student and Black woman who pursued her purpose and thrived against adversity, with the benefit of individualized help from Western faculty and staff, Merze Tate College is committed to honoring her legacy by providing the same guidance and support to our students today that President Waldo gave her nearly 100 years ago." Joining me now to discuss Merze Tate is historian Dr. Barbara Savage, the Geraldine R. Segal Professor Emerita of American Social Thought and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of, "Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar."

Hi, Barbara, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Barbara Savage  10:12  
Thank you for having me. 

Kelly  10:14  
Well, I was delighted to learn about Merze Tate. You, in the book, refer to yourself as her reluctant biographer, so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, how you got interested in her life and ended up reluctantly becoming her biographer?

Dr. Barbara Savage  10:30  
Well, I, because I'm a scholar of 20th century African American history, and a good portion of my writing and research is dependent on time spent, over the years, in the archives at Howard University in Washington, I became sort of vaguely familiar with almost everybody on the faculty there. So I knew Tate's name, but I didn't know much more than that about her. I became involved in a project on Black women's intellectual history, which was exactly what it sounds like. It was an attempt to try to reclaim and insert Black women intellectuals, both scholars and non scholars into some broader debates from which they're normally excluded. And we all decided that we would each write an essay for this volume, even though we were the we were co-editing it. I had begun work on a project on African American missionaries. And when I began Googling around for information on that, the first article that popped up, was in the Journal of Negro History, now the Journal of African American History. And it was an article by Tate, but it was not on African American missionaries, but was on white American missionaries, who had gone to Hawaii in the 1820s, as part of the the first move, she would argue towards both the annexation, and eventually statehood  for Hawaii. And so that was very intriguing to me. And I did not know that or her work. And because of digitization, and the magic of it, I then started looking around to see what else she'd written. And that's when I stumbled into this whole large body of published work by this woman that I knew so little about. And so I was really drawn into her through her work. And also just trying to understand who is this woman, and the more I dug, the more interesting she became. And I ended up thinking of myself as a reluctant biographer, because I had never had an intention to write a biography of anyone, and had been, and I think, still remain intimidated by the form, and by the, by the genre, seeing it as something that requires a set of literary chops that I may or may not have. And yet more, the more I learned about her work, and about how how she came to do the work, her own personal life and history, the more intrigued I became. And so at some point, I just decided that there was enough, both interesting, fascinating person and life, and also extraordinary body of scholarship, that she deserved much more attention than she'd ever received. And so I actually felt in some ways that she actually was calling me to do this work. And I, at some point, she bent my will, and I gave into that. And one thing led to another and a decade later, you know, we have a book. And so that's, that is, in fact, how I still think of myself as her reluctant biographer.

Kelly  13:55  
I feel like she bent the will of a lot of people.

Dr. Barbara Savage  13:58  
She was a very formidable and a person in that way in a very willful person, both and just extraordinary power of personality.

Kelly  14:07  
Yeah. So you mentioned a little bit how what the volume of published work she has, she's got a lot of unpublished work, but there's just incredible volume of material here for you to work with. And you were just saying, you know, that that didn't, it wasn't a natural genre for you to write a biography. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you approached that huge volume of material, putting it into a work and it was a little ironic, as I was reading, she had so much trouble sometimes paring down work, you know, wanted to put so much detail in. This isn't super long in terms of a biography, but you're able to pack a lot of detail into it. So could you talk a little bit about that process?

Dr. Barbara Savage  14:48  
Yes, she published five books and dozens and dozens of articles. I think one of them, we were talking about my being a reluctant biographer for her, one of the things that was also very intimidating about taking up this project is that I'm a 20th century African American historian. I am not a diplomatic historian, I do not study international relations. It would have been so much easier to do this work had she simply studied African American history. Her work would have been legible to me in a certain kind of way, it would have, you know, I would have, it would have been much more, much easier for me to evaluate it and place it. And so in this case, she writes about sort of two main bodies of work, if I can summarize it in that way. Her first set of interests have has to do with armaments, and in particular, after World War II,  with nuclear armaments. And so she really writes the definitive history of disarmament movements starting in the 19th century, and coming forward, in on the European side, actually, primarily, and then a second set of works on US engagement with armaments. And what was most interesting to me about that work was that she used it to argue that nations needed armaments, not only to defend themselves, and in some cases, not even primarily to defend themselves, but they needed armaments and navies and all of what we you know, we now think of in very expansive terms, because they wanted to be able to either acquire and or maintain and control colonies in faraway places like Hawaii, from the from the United States perspective. And so she's making an argument argument, that armaments are really entered entwined with an age of imperialism and age of, of colonization, and the maintenance of those empires. And so that was very interesting to me. And that that bit of work, then, after World War II, she's writing a second volume in the wake of the US use of the atomic bomb. And so she then devotes a fair amount of attention to the perils of atomic testing in the Pacific, but also the dangers of a nuclear arms race. And that work remains as prescient now as it was then. And so that's one chunk of her of her writing. The other, the other and the larger body of work has to do with the Pacific. And it began, as I said earlier, with an interest in to the United States annexation, and individual acquisition, and as it were, of Hawaii, but she also is very interested in imperialism in the entirety of the Southwest Pacific, and not just US imperialism, she's thinking in very trans Imperial ways. But that's, you know, that's her original hook on that. And also then begins to look at the ways that Australia and New Zealand begin to cast their eyes on their smaller neighboring islands. And, and so raises questions then about settler colonists trying to colonize other other islands. And I'm not giving her her work, the kind of detail that it requires. But in all of that work, she's very interested in Indigenous people, and in the relationship between race and imperialism. And so she we're seeing that in her work in Hawaii, she writes about it also in India, and towards the end of her career, she writes about it in terms of, of Africa, which she's able to visit in the 1970s. And so if there's a through line in her work from disarmament, through all of that, the Pacific and Africa and Asia, it is an interest, as she would say, in the way that Indigenous people are themselves often treated no better than or as if they were commodities to be exchanged, exploited, overtaken, overcome. And that is the sort of the essence of her political approach to those issues. So in order to do this work, which was all outside of my field, I think one of the things I learned and I've, you know, I've written a couple of other books and done some other things, but I really had to depend on colleagues in those fields to help me. So it was very humbling and and very encouraging. People were very eager to do that. But I had to rely on you know, run around and talk to the people who knew about India and Indian history, or my colleagues who were in International Relations and diplomatic in the region, tell me, am I getting this right, what else should I read? And so in that way, that's how I managed to do the work and I take responsibility for my own interpretations of these works that are outside of my field. But I, I think that she also writes in a very legible way, although there is a great deal of detail in her work, but I can understand what she's trying to do. And so I read it through the lens of an African American, just to be frank. And, and in that way, I think I was able to see the way that that race and imperialism entwined, as I said earlier, but also is present in very interesting ways through you through almost all of her work.

Kelly  20:36  
I'd love to talk a little bit about her upbringing in Michigan. You know, this is not necessarily the kind of upbringing people might imagine that Black woman would have had in this time period. But she grows up in a place where there are very few Black people, and seemingly doesn't have a lot of concept of racism early on. So you know, I wonder if you could talk through that a little bit and the importance of her having grown up in this place in the rural Michigan.

Dr. Barbara Savage  21:05  
Yes, Tate was born in in 1905, in the middle of central Michigan, to parents and actually grandparents who were homesteaders. They had moved to Michigan in the 1860s, to take advantage of land. If you could get there, and and, and clear it and farm it and as a way to become land owners. So for one of the things, she is the grandchild of a in a family that is already freed from slavery well before the Civil War. So that's, that's significant, because they moved to Michigan, but they were already living in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and had moved from Virginia and other places in the generations before. And so that's one thing. When they moved to Michigan, as I as you said, they are scattered and isolated in these small communities, you know, throughout the, throughout the state. And so she is they are minority. Michigan is a fairly right, Michigan is not a racial utopia in any way. But it certainly is certainly different from the kind of upbringing and opportunity that a child born in the south would have had. She often said herself, and she was right, that it made all the difference in a world that she was born in Michigan, and not in Mississippi. For one thing she had access to, to a very good elementary and secondary education, which would have been unusual for many Americans, Black or white. And certainly if they were Black and living in the rural south, that would have been almost unheard of in that period. And she was able to then also go to a predominantly white state funded institution to be trained as a high school history teacher and graduated from Western Michigan University in 1927, again, achieving a college degree at a time when very few women, and certainly very few African Americans and African American women are able to do that. And so in that way, Michigan matters because of the educational opportunity that she has there. And I explained in the book that when she graduates from Western Michigan, lo and behold, she realizes that despite the fact that her degree comes from a white institution in the state, they will not hire her as a high school teacher. And she has to leave Michigan and move to Indianapolis to get a job in a segregated a great segregated high school, Black high school in Indianapolis. I think the thing that's also important about her growing up in Michigan is that from her parents and her grandparents, she learns this sort of fierce independence, that I think you can imagine people who are felling, you know, who are knocking down pine trees and building homes and, and living in that very harsh, isolated land, and particularly in the winters. And so she credits that tough upbringing as actually being something something that added to her own strength. And I think that she's that she's right about that.

Kelly  24:26  
So, Tate seems to have this incredible ability to sort of have community around her, build community around her, no matter where, you know, she travels a lot. She moves around a lot, but she's always able to find this community. And one really important community for her is when she joins the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, and that ends up having a huge impact on her life. Listeners may know, AKA is still around, it's the sorority that Vice President Harris is a member of. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, and the way that throughout our her life, having made this decision to be part of that community becomes really important to her.

Dr. Barbara Savage  25:05  
She is in Indianapolis and is invited to become a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha. So in some ways, it's a little bit unusual because she's not in college, though this is not it is, in fact, a way that the sorority recruits and brings in members who've gone to schools where the the sorority does not exist. And this when she moves to Indianapolis, it's very significant because it is the first time that she's living in a large Black urban community. And Indianapolis is thriving at that time. It's Maddie, Madam CJ Walker, it's the crossroads of all sorts of things going on, lots of activism. So it's in that community that she is recruited by, by women who are members of that sorority. And what is most significant about that is that they had established an international fellowship or an opportunity. They wanted to make a way for, for their members to be able to study abroad, which was something that was that was not available to women more generally, but certainly not to African American women in that period. And so she competed for and won a $1,000 scholarship from them in 1931. And it was that money that enabled her and she had this audacious idea, which was realized that to go and study at Oxford, an institution she'd heard about, knew enough about it to know that it was the place to go that it was considered one of the best if not the best university in the world. And through lots of curves, she was in fact able to get there. But it was the money from the AKA that enabled that. And she then had to supplement it into hustling to try to get more money while she was there. And so she was really indebted to them, and felt that very deeply wanted to represent the sorority and the race, if I might say that, as well as possible. She saw herself on the vanguard of a certain kind of modern Black womanhood that includes international travel and international study. And so that time at Oxford, at the end of which he's there 1932 to 1935, and she leaves with a graduate degree in International Relations, becoming the first Black American to earn a graduate degree from Oxford. And it was not an entirely easy three years. She managed to get what she intended. But the AKA remained very important to her so that when she returned from Oxford, and moves to North Carolina to teach there, she establishes a relationship with a chapter in North Carolina. When she leaves there, eventually goes to Washington to join the faculty at Howard in 1942, she moves her membership with her to the Washington chapter, which was the original, the original Howard and Washington, of course, where the founding place of the AKA. And so she remains really affiliated with them. And there're these overlapping circles of AKA members, other high school teachers and college teachers who are Black women. And it's an overlapping and reinforcing national network. It's small at that time, but it's a national network of educated Black women, and she thrives in it. And I think it really sits at the core of of how she sees herself. And it also encourages her at all times, to represent Black women in all the ways that that she can.

Kelly  29:03  
So let's talk some more about Howard then. She she really deliberately ends up at Howard. She she is like building her her career to get there, does manage to get there, eventually becomes part of the regular faculty. And you know, it's a place where she obviously is accepted by race, being a historically Black college, but she still runs into this rampant sexism that really is frustrating to her. Could you talk a little bit about that, and you know what, what she's able to do despite these challenges?

Dr. Barbara Savage  29:38  
She said that all the time that she was born into a racist and sex discriminating society. And you're absolutely right that when she comes to Howard, for the first time, ironically, I think she really is in an institution that is run primarily by by Black men. There are other very powerful and brilliant and important Black women on that faculty. But when she joined it as the first Black woman in the history department, the deans, the the president, all of the leadership is still male. They don't really know what to do with her, frankly, because she's unmarried and, and does not have children. And so she's already kind of outside of the standard perceptions of what a woman might be with the kinds of social status and connectedness that comes from marriage at that, you know, at that time. She has studied at Harvard, as many of them have, but she's also studied at Oxford. And so she is supremely confident. She had never learned how to defer to anyone, anywhere, whether she was at Oxford, or certainly even when she got to Howard. And that was really literally not a part of her temperament. And so she was a strong, independent, and she was a grown woman, as we would say, in there since that, by the way, when she gets there in 1942, she's 37 years old. She's not someone in their, in her 20s. And so she deals with it by complaining and protesting, frankly, and writing over the whole tenure of her career there, writing and complaining and organizing, as best she can, raising the question of disparities in faculty, in access to research funding, and access to to leave and summer opportunities, which he sees as controlled by the men for the men. Now, I'll say in Howard's defense that Howard, to its credit, was hiring women faculty. You know, Harvard and Yale, and all sorts of other institutions were not yet. And so they were they were always co-ed and they and they, they did hire women faculty. But it did not mean that there was not resistance or some fairly narrow conceptions of what women's roles should be there. But when she arrived there, as I said, she joined a group of formidable Black women throughout the campus. And she became a leader in raising these issues of gender inequality on that on the campus.

Kelly  32:31  
So we should definitely talk about her travels, because they are incredible. It was exhausting just to read all the places that she went. So could you talk a little bit about that? And she's, you know, a little bit unique in that she she's perfectly willing to just go and travel by herself and doesn't worry about, perhaps she worried about her safety, but she goes anyway, and and perseveres and finds people because she has built these communities everywhere. She finds people everywhere she goes that she knows or gets to know, and you know, is able to sort of have a taste of home that way. But could you talk a little bit about that, because it's just incredible, all the places that she manages to go to?

Dr. Barbara Savage  33:08  
Yes, it's one of the most vexing aspects of writing about her, frankly, is, is that she traveled incessantly. Even before she goes to Oxford in 1942, she's already traveled to Europe. She's already, the year before, she had been to London and Paris, and Geneva and sort of the bug around internet, the bug meaning the interest in international relations had had already affected her. She'd already observed the League of Nations. And that's part of why she wants to study international relations and wants to go to Oxford. I think in order to be a good solo traveler, you need to be able to, you're self possessed. You're not afraid of being alone or lonely, and you're very comfortable in your own mind. And she was very devoted to being a solo traveler. She traveled around the world twice, once east to west and once west to east. And as a woman traveling alone, the method to do that is basically to move safely from you know, from one safe harbor to another, from this person or this entity, this woman's college, this, these missionaries, this American to another, and in that way she was she did ensure her safety. But she also had the gift for easy conversation. She spoke French and had some German, and also was I think we all fit in. Working on her and her travels, it also reminded me of a much earlier age of travel, where being, traveling as a stranger and then actually engaging in conversations and things. I sit next to people on airplanes all the time for hours and never say a word. But that would have been unheard of, you know, in her time. So she traveled all over the world and 1950 and 51, she was one of the earliest holders of a Fulbright. And she spent that in India and traveled all over that vast continent, continent, by small plane and train, and also used that as the base from which to then explore large parts of Asia, you know, Cambodia and other parts of the Pacific, and eventually coming back through through Hawaii. So that was one set of travel. But in the course of her life, she was in the Soviet Union. In the 1970s, she was finally able to get to Africa. And she did explore the Pacific Southwest extensively, you know, Fiji, smaller islands, Australia, New Zealand, all of that. And so for me, as her biographer, she saw, saw travel as so central to her life, and she saw the time she spent in India and the time she spent in Oxford, as so so key, and the highlight of her life that I felt compelled to try to go and see what was there that would have how that would have would have affected her and in what way. And so I was privileged to spend a year at Oxford, and to get some sense of that place, and which is an educational system that is vastly different from our own, but set in an architectural infrastructure that has been there since the 1400s. And so it's intact, I saw what she saw. There's more, and there's different, but I actually did see what she saw. And, and so that was very helpful to me. And from there, I actually went to India. It's a little bit closer than from Philadelphia, and went to Kolkata, and then from there to the university that she had been assigned to, which is outside of Kolkata, and spent a week or 10 days there, just trying to retrace her steps, which was fairly easy to do, because she kept very detailed notes on where she went and everything she spent and all of that. And so I think I have followed her around the world in my own ways, and the Hawaii and Thailand, which was very important to her. And so I've been asked, you know, what is what is she? Someone asked me, is she running away? What is she running away from? And I said, I don't, she's not really running away. She really has all of his intellectual curiosity. She wants to see things for herself. She wants to, to she's fascinated by both the natural world architectural wonders, mechanical wonders, all of that she wants to see it for herself. She's a photographer, she takes moving pictures, then comes back and does slideshows for Black audiences, and churches and civic and civic institutions. So she's going also as an educator, as someone who's going to go and come back and tell people what she saw, but also why it's important that if they can, that they also travel and go themselves. And the final thing I will say about that is it was certainly very familiar with the trope of Black expats in Paris or wherever, who are able to, to live free of American racism, which is not to say entirely free of racism, but in particular kind of American racism, especially in that period. And I do think that that little blue passport that she had, when she was using that that was one of the few times that she was able to feel the privileges of being an American when she was not on this in this land, but but someplace else and recognized as a Black American, when she was moving around the world. 

Kelly  38:57  
Yeah, so just to highlight how incredible she was you were talking about being mechanical, she also had two inventions?

Dr. Barbara Savage  39:06  
I know this is baffling to me, she I and I checked it, she invented a device which would have which would have enabled you to make ice cream in your freezer. And it actually is a precursor to kind of a Cuisinart ice cream maker, because she knew the long arduous way of hand beating to make ice cream, which is what she grew up with. And when I saw this, but I researched and had and found the patent records. This was in 1948, and there it is. And I don't know when she invented it, but also that she would also think that she wanted to get a patent. So it's that kind of ambition and drive and determination and ego strength that the I think that episode says as much about that and her as, as any other any other thing.

Kelly  40:03  
So then toward the end of her life, she's involved in this oral history project. Could you talk a little bit about that, because that is not the kind of history that she had been doing, up until that point, but it becomes really essential. And it seems like she was incredibly gifted at doing these oral interviews.

Dr. Barbara Savage  40:21  
Yes, in 1976, she's asked to be an advisor for the Black Women's Oral History Project at Schlesinger Library, which, of course, is a very famous and a very, very important, archival holding for African American women's history. And she's on the advisory board. And then she actually in she, so she's trying to, she's involved in trying to help them figure out who they might interview and who would be important. And they're trying to find women of her generation, actually, who have been able to succeed and become professional women and to contribute in all sorts of fields, despite everything, everything that we know about that period, in terms of both racism and segregation, and sexism. And so she ends up becoming, she ends up herself being interviewed for the project, but she's the only person interviewed who also decides to become an interviewer. And she interviewed seven formidable women in this project, in part because she thinks that she will be able to elicit a much more forthcoming and better set of interviews, because she will be speaking to them as equals, as opposed to some young graduate student, no disrespect to young graduate students. And so in that way, she actually is, is able to coax these women who are then at the end, nearly nearing the end of their lives, they're in their 60s 70s, some of their older than that. And it's an interesting part of the book for me. It's in the final chapter of the book. But it's one of the few times when I can actually see her engaged in conversation with other women, because you have both sides of the conversation going on there. So on the one hand, she's guiding and leading and protecting, because she's very proud of these of these women, but also asking very, very deep questions about the effect of racism and sexism in their own lives, or really about the whole process of what it means to look back at one's life in in your 70s, or 80s, at the end of your career, and it's a very poignant part, is a very poignant process for her, I think, because she's exactly the same age and is doing the same thing. Now, when it comes to her own interview, she ends up having an interview that is so much longer and so much more detailed and stretching forever, that it is more or less never completed. And also it yields an enormous transcript, though in inchoate form and was never published. And so that was a gift to me, or anyone who wanted to write about her. But I also just think that her relationship and the ease of her her conversational bearing in those interviews told me a lot about a lot more about how she was with other people in ways that I would not have been able to have gotten otherwise.

Kelly  43:44  
So it may be obvious to listeners that there's simply no way we could talk talk about all of Tate's life in one podcast episode. So they should go read this book, how can they get a copy? 

Dr. Barbara Savage  43:53  
Well, the book was released on November 21, from Yale University Press. And I would recommend that people get it from independent bookstores in whatever ways they can, or at their libraries or see if they can get their libraries to round up a copy for them. But in all the ways that people go about, you know, finding that work. So thank you for that. 

Kelly  44:19  
Is there anything else you wanted to talk about? 

Dr. Barbara Savage  44:21  
Just to say that, what I've learned most, I think, from this book, both, it speaks to the importance of this quest for education among African Americans, which is a very persistent theme in African American history. And we see that drive and that commitment with her. But I think the second thing I learned is how important it is for us to explore the lives of lesser known women, lesser known figures in general and I'm talking about Black women in particular, but I I just think that there are things that we learn from lives we know nothing about and there are all of these really exceptional, exceptional people who've done extraordinary things. And it's important for us to recognize that because of segregation or discrimination sexism, that we've been denied, or they have been erased from history, and what they have offered us, has been lost to us. And that in this case, Tate is a scholar, so I can place her there. But we can think about it in terms of any field or any, any any kind of life. And so that's, I think that's the other. That's the other thing is that if we can move away from the usual suspects, we just find this whole other world of exciting, interesting figures who still have so much to teach us.

Kelly  45:47  
Well, thank you so much for telling her story and for speaking with me today. 

Dr. Barbara Savage  45:52  
Well, thank you so much for the invitation. And thank you for reading carefully. Thank you.

Teddy  46:35  
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