Thammasat University students interested in history, sociology, education, human rights, black studies, Africa, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 10 May Zoom webinar on Merze Tate, Africa, and the Future of Black Studies.

The event, on Friday, 10 May 2024 at 9pm Bangkok time, is presented by the University of Birmingham, the United Kingdom.

The TU Library collection includes research about black studies.

The speaker will be Professor Barbara Savage who teaches American social thought in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the United States of America.

As explained on the event website,

In her new book, Merze Tate: the Global Odyssey of Black Woman Scholar, Professor Barbara Savage (University of Pennsylvania) uncovers the life and work of a prolific diplomatic historian at Howard University in Washington, DC from 1942-1977.

Despite living in what Tate called a “race and sex discriminating” world, she earned graduate degrees from Oxford (international relations, 1935) and Harvard (government, 1941).  She spent a year in India in 1950-51 as a Fulbright scholar, traveled in Asia and the Pacific, and published five groundbreaking books on arms limitations and on US imperialism in the Pacific.

This talk examines Tate’s final and unpublished work on Africa in the late 1970s.  She brought prescient attention to the growing US corporate presence there by focusing on new seaports and railroad construction, a network she called the “sinews and arteries of empire.”  Tate warned of international capital’s threat to post-independence Africa.  Savage will conclude by raising questions about another consequence of globalization:  increased African immigration to the US (post-1970s) and to the UK and how  that  unsettles paradigms in African American Studies and Black British Studies.

Professor Savage’s research is available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Service.

Her summary of the life of Dr. Merze Tate was posted on the website of the American Historical Association.

It reads in part:

MERZE TATE (1905–96)

Tate forged an extraordinary career as a prolific scholar, teacher, and public intellectual. She published groundbreaking histories that relied on an innovative comparative, transimperial, and antiracist approach to studying the Pacific, India, Asia, and Africa. Howard University’s history department’s first Black female faculty member, she served there from 1942 until her retirement in 1977. […]

Tate studied economics and international relations at the University of Oxford, becoming in 1935 the first Black American to earn a graduate degree there. She joined the faculty of Bennett College, where a Rosenwald Fellowship enabled her in 1941 to become the first Black woman to earn a government degree from Harvard University.

Tate brought to print five books, 34 journal articles, and 45 review essays during a time when segregation and discrimination routinely excluded women and Black men from academic publishing and professional societies, including this one. Her books were The Disarmament Illusion: The Movement for a Limitation of Armaments to 1907 (Macmillan, 1942); The United States and Armaments (Harvard Univ. Press, 1948); The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom: A Political History (Yale Univ. Press, 1965); Hawaii: Reciprocity or Annexation (Michigan State Univ. Press, 1968); and Diplomacy in the Pacific: A Collection of Twenty-Seven Articles on Diplomacy in the Pacific and Influence of the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands Missionaries (Howard Univ. Press, 1973).

Her body of work stands as a testament to her intellectual prowess and persistence, as well as to her unusual capacity for both panoramic conceptual imagination and sustained archival research across disparate regions and topics. Tate’s unusual training prepared her to embrace interdisciplinarity before it was in vogue, borrowing methods from diplomatic, economic, and political history; geography and geopolitics; and international relations.

An intrepid solo traveler, she circled the globe twice, sometimes combining her research and her sightseeing. In 1950–51, Tate held one of the earliest Fulbright Fellowships; she requested to go to India and was assigned to Tagore’s Visva-Bharati University near Kolkata, which she used as a base for lecturing in India, Asia, and the Pacific. In the 1970s, she traveled to Africa, about which she had written and taught for decades. Her final research project was an investigation into the expansion of railroads, deep-sea ports, mineral extraction, and international corporate imperialism in postindependence Africa. That work went unpublished, but her attention to the power of global capital was no less prescient as she worried about modern forms of re-imperialization. […]

The website of Oxford University adds:

Merze Tate (1905-1996)

Professor Merze Tate’s life is full of firsts, breaking racial and gender barriers in pursuit of education. She was the first African-American woman to study at Oxford University and the first African American to be awarded a B.Litt. by the university in 1935. A specialist in international and diplomatic history, she counselled General Eisenhower on disarmament in the late 1940s. She attended The Society of Oxford Home-Students (now St Anne’s College) from 1932 to 1935. […]

Merze Tate went on to become the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate in Government and International Relations from Harvard University’s Radcliffe College in 1941. She expressed her gratitude for the support of her former tutors by sending them a copy of the commencement program, with the inscription “May thanks for all that you did to make this day possible.” On the programme, she also proudly noted ‘Inducted Into Phi Beta Kappa June 17’. She later published her dissertation, titled ‘The Movement for a Limitation of Armament to 1907’, which she gifted to St Anne’s College Library, where it can now be found in the St Anne’s Authors collection.

Merze Tate’s legacy includes her contributions to challenging gender and racial discrimination within the academic system. In 1942, she became the first Black female professor of history at Howard University, a position she held for 35 years. Her books encompass studies on the disarmament movement and the relations between Hawaii and the United States.

Awareness of Merze Tate and her remarkable work has been increasing, resulting in numerous new publications that delve into her life and achievements. These resources provide further insight into her significant contributions and serve to commemorate her enduring legacy. […]

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)