Vernie Merze Tate
Vernie Merze Tate was a scholar and expert on United States diplomacy. She was the first African American graduate of Western Michigan Teachers College (now Western Michigan University), the first African American woman to receive an advanced degree from Oxford University, the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University (then Radcliffe College), and one of the first two female members in the Department of History at Howard University.
Born in Blanchard, Michigan, she was educated at Western Michigan Teachers College (B.A., with honors and teaching diploma, 1927), Columbia University’s Teachers College (M.A., 1930), Oxford University (B.Litt., international relations, 1935), Geneva School of International Studies, University of Berlin, and Harvard University (Ph.D., government, 1941).
She was prohibited from teaching high school in Michigan due to her race, so she relocated to Indianapolis, where she taught history at Crispus Attucks High School from 1927 to 1932. She then taught at Barber Scotia College in North Carolina, where she was Dean of Women; at Bennett College, where she was Chair of History and Social Science; and at Morgan State College, before joining Howard University, where she served from 1942 to 1975 as professor of history. She advised General Dwight D. Eisenhower on disarmament in the 1940s. As one of the earliest Fulbright scholars, she spent a year in India from 1950–1951, which also allowed her to explore Asia and the Indo-Pacific.
Her first book, The Disarmament Illusion: The Movement for a Limitation of Armaments to 1907 (1942), received critical praise. Her second book, The United States and Armaments (1948), was widely used by the Department of State and by the Committee for World Development and World Disarmament. She published three other books: The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom: A Political History (1965); Hawaii: Reciprocity or Annexation (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 (1973).
In 1984, she was named by the Department of State as one of three Americans to represent the United States at a UNESCO Seminar. Tate traveled widely, visiting and meeting with leaders in the Soviet Union, India, Cambodia, Australia, New Zealand, and eleven African countries. Her achievements were recognized with some fifteen awards, including Isabella County’s Most Distinguished Citizen Award in 1964 and the 1981 Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Association of State Colleges and Universities. Tate was also a philanthropist and established funds at three institutions that assisted her in her profession: Western Michigan University, Radcliffe College, and Harvard University.