“Recommendations in the report,” stated Charles S. Johnson, “have implications for our own educational system, and perhaps for our own society.” Johnson, a sociologist and Fisk University's first African-American president, addressed the 1948 South Central Forum in Chicago discussing the fundamental inconsistencies existing between democracy recommended in occupied Japan's education system and the democracy practiced in America's education system. The report Johnson's speech refers to was the product of the Education Mission to Japan: a twenty-seven-member American committee selected for their expertise as educators and scholars. Charged with an advisory role to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) and the Japanese Ministry of Education (JME), the committee's primary objective extended from SCAP's overall mission: to democratize and mollify postwar Japan. Johnson, a civil rights advocate and race relations scholar, was the sole African American and only nonwhite member of this committee.

In the Fall of 1962, high school seniors Leon Zachery and Deitra Caul submitted applications for the Philadelphia City Scholarship competition. Both students excelled in high school, but both Zachery, whose mother worked in childcare, and Caul, whose mother did clerical work for the Presbyterian Life Magazine, feared that without outside assistance they would not be able to afford college tuition. In the letter supporting his application, Zachery's biology teacher at West Philadelphia high school described him as a “serious young man” who “knows a great deal about various subjects that is not required study… [and] seems to have become well-read from his intensive study.” “He is an exceptional boy [who] I feel should go to college or it would be a dreadful waste,” the teacher concluded. Caul's guidance counselor, William Cannady, offered a similar appraisal. Cannady, one of the first black high school teachers in Philadelphia, noted that Deitra Caul graduated first in her class at Gratz high school and “participated extensively in extra-curricular activities without any loss in academic status.” “It would be tragic,” Cannady wrote, “if Miss Caul had to forgo college because of a lack of finances.” With stellar academic records and demonstrated financial need, Zachery and Caul were among the forty-nine City Scholarship winners in 1962–1963, and the only two African-American students so selected.

In the early 1860s, the Ruhr Valley town of Dortmund had no schools for girls beyond the elementary level with the exception of a few private establishments that trained domestic servants. This dearth of educational opportunities is hardly surprising in a town of just 25,000 people at a time when even many larger German cities were bereft of secondary schools for girls. By 1914, however, when Dortmund's population had grown tenfold to well over 250,000, girls or their parents could choose among numerous types of institutions beyond the basic elementary school—several secondary schools, middle schools, and a variety of vocational and commercial institutions, most of them under municipal control.

One week before the 1908 U.S. presidential election, the women of the Hesperian Literary Society at the State University of Iowa (SUI, now the University of Iowa) presented “a unique program” in the form of a mock political rally. Imagining that they lived in a town where women had “been honored by the legislature with the ballot,” the “Hep” members divided into clubs that supported various candidates and causes. Several women formed the Utopian Club, which promoted William Jennings Bryan's presidential candidacy, while the members who comprised the Women's Culture Club supported William Howard Taft. Heps who pretended to belong to the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) argued for prohibition. Portraying the era's political dynamism, other Heps represented anarchists, socialists, and independents. A woman from each group spoke in support of her cause in front of a crowd that included “a lot of” college men. SUI senior and Hep member Ione Mulnix described the rally in a letter to her parents: “[T]he speeches were of course very ridiculous. The reasons why each was the best were very feminine and would hardly convince a man.” She explained that the Utopian Club representative “argued for Bryan because he was the best looking.” The Heps ended their program by setting loose a toy mouse, causing the actors to scream and scatter. Finding the fictitious rally “awfully funny,” Mulnix noted that the Hep women “acted their parts to perfection” and that the college men “seemed to appreciate it immensely.”

This study discusses Merze Tate, a black woman faculty member at Howard University from 1942 to 1977, and her efforts throughout her tenure at the institution to obtain gender equity for women faculty. This study also discusses Tate's decades-long battle with Rayford Logan, chair of the history department of Howard. Both Harvard PhDs, their difficulties reflect both gender differences as well as professional jealously. Tate was the first black woman to earn a degree from Oxford University (International Relations, 1935) and the first black woman to earn a PhD from Harvard in the fields of government and international relations (1941). She joined the faculty at Howard University in 1942, as one of two women ever hired in the history department. She remained on the faculty until her retirement in 1977. Tate is significant not only for her academic accomplishments and her advocacy on behalf of women but also as one of the earliest tenured women faculty members at Howard. In addition, she was a part of a very small group of highly accomplished black women academics who devoted their lives to the education of black youth. In a 1946 study of black doctorate and professional degree holders, Harry Washington Greene noted that of the three hundred eighty-one recipients, only forty-five were women. Black women were overwhelmingly enrolled and graduated from teacher training colleges that were unaccredited and/or did not provide the curriculum to attend graduate school without taking an additional year of undergraduate studies. The time and cost factor were prohibitive and many black women attended summer schools for years to take courses to prepare them for a graduate degree program.