Her work includes Your Spirits Walk Beside Us, winner of the 2012 Grawemeyer Prize in Religion.
Savage applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Merze Tate at the Yale University Press website.Writing in 1943, Tate compares Nazism abroad with racism in the federal government and segregation in the military. She expresses her wish that the end of World War II usher in a “new global order with freedom guaranteed for all and an end to vast empires.” Arguing “that a return to pre-World War II status quo would not satisfy since so many soldiers of color had served in the military,” she lamented that as a professor at Howard University, she had worked to “help prepare the ‘best and brightest’ of her race for the potentially fatal dangers and disruptions of military service.”Surprisingly, page 99 captures several important aspects of Tate’s life and her work in what she called a “race and sex discriminating” world. I had been skeptical about the Page 99 Test's application to a biography but it works.
After serving in a temporary faculty position at Howard for four years, Tate in 1946 finally “became a professor of history, at long last garnering the respect and academic freedom that came with that distinction, then an absolute rarity for women. She positioned herself as a diplomatic historian of international relations, a new field she conceptualized as broadly multidisciplinary. A trailblazer in this regard, she saw a reliance on many disciplines as essential to understanding global politics. This seemed especially important at a time when the interrelatedness of the world in which technological innovations in aviation and communications were shrinking the distance and space between economics and politics.”
First, it highlights her deep commitment to teaching and supporting her students, especially during a time of global war when as she feared, for good reason, that some of them would be killed or seriously wounded, as was the case. The complicated nature of black patriotism is also present – men and women serving in a military that continued to segregate and discriminate; that service was hoped once again to be a gateway to their full recognition as American citizens. As a 16 year old, Tate had made the same argument in an oratorical contest in the middle of World War I.
Second, this page captures one trailblazing moment in a life full of “firsts,” as the challenge of having to wait patiently (despite her degrees from Oxford and Harvard) for the opportunity to work as a professor at a time when women and black women in particular were excluded from that career. None of those achievements came easily and this excerpt is another reminder of that.
Finally, it also provides a glimpse of recurring arguments in her scholarship – anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and a commitment to end the political and economic exploitation of the “darker peoples of the world” whether in India, Asia, the Pacific, or Africa.
The only theme it misses is that Tate was an intrepid solo global traveler, an identity central to both her life and her work. But alas WWII blocked international travel despite her best efforts; but in 1950, she won an early Fulbright fellowship and lived in India for a year, traveling within and throughout Asia and the Pacific.
--Marshal Zeringue
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