Non-Profit Leader
When I founded the Merze Tate Explorers in 2008, I desired to share Tate’s legacy with girls and the world. After nearly 15 years of work in the name of Merze Tate, Western Michigan University named a college in her honor in 2021. The Merze Tate College has a mission to help students explore possibilities in life, as the Explorers organization has since 2008!
Pictured are me with the Explorers after the dedication ceremony in the Bernhard Center at Western Michigan University.
Girls Can!
Sonya poses with Explorers at Western Michigan University (2021) after the naming of the Merze Tate College. The girls also unveiled their fall magazine edition to those in attendance.
Sonya in Tanzania with girls from Mwanza
After months of working together via Zoom with girls in Tanzania, Sonya visited their sisters in Africa to celebrate their partnership in providing scholarships to girls to complete their education and training program dreams.
Merze Tate Explorers
The Merze Tate Explorers began as a grassroots project in 2008. I learned of Dr. Vernie Merze Tate during a series I wrote for the Kalamazoo Gazette on the First African Americans at Western Michigan University. The alumni association at the college provided me with a list of about 25 African Americans whose legacy at the institution included everyone, from the first African American student to the First African American homecoming king. In between it all was the name Merze Tate. I had never heard of Merze Tate. As an alumna of WMU myself, I never knew that they named a center for her in Sangren Hall as part of a more than $50,000 donation to provide technology to the university.
Once I visited the college archives, Sharon Carlson, then archive director, shared three boxes of scrapbooks left at WMU after Tate died in 1996. Wow! It was like a goldmine of history. What intrigued me the most was a photo of her with about 40 African American students all dressed for a trip. Tate was in front of the group, holding a sign that read Travel Club. As the first history teacher at Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis, Tate felt it would be beneficial to take her students at the all-black school to Washington, D.C., to learn the history of the nation’s capital. That was in 1932.
I desired to write a book about this amazing trailblazer. I learned she was also the first African American graduate of Oxford University, an inventor, an international history expert, a world traveler, and more. However, the photograph of the students stuck with me. I started a Travel Club.
In 2008, I put out a call for girls in grades 6th-12th who would be interested in becoming travel writers. While I had zero dollars and no place to meet, it was set to meet in East Hall on WMU’s campus. East Hall was the original home of WMU and the very building where Tate took her classes to become a teacher. Twelve girls and their parents showed up. The rest is history.
Today, the Merze Tate Explorers have traveled throughout their community and beyond to learn of college and career opportunities as they meet amazing people. Together, they produce a quarterly Girls Can! Magazine, https://issuu.com/communityvoices and have inspired WMU to name a college for Tate, only one of three in the country named for an African American woman on a predominately white campus.
Learn more about the Merze Tate Explorers at https://www.merzetate.org .
