Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar

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 20th 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.