Helping to facilitate the national conversation on race has been Beverly Daniel Tatum's overarching area of specialization. She first took on that role as a young university instructor, and has spent her career helping people from all backgrounds, and especially college students, learn to talk with one another about that fraught but crucial topic.
The author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?; president emerita of Spelman College, a historically black college for women in Atlanta, Ga.; and a longtime academic, Tatum notes that today, colleges all over the country are struggling to create communities from increasingly diversified groups of students, which isn't easy.
"There's a lot of unlearning that has to happen in order for young people to engage effectively with each other, and we need to be creating opportunities for that learning to take place on campuses," says Tatum, who in 2014 received the APA's Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology, its highest honor.
As a fledgling adjunct teacher at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), in the early 1980s, Tatum brought her training as a clinical psychologist and her experience running therapy groups to bear in a class designed for students to discuss racism among themselves. Those conversations weren't happening much at the time, Tatum recalls, but it was "such a powerful bridge" for those early students that she taught the course every term for as long as she was at UCSB.
"The other regular professors didn't really like this group exploration concept," she recalls, but it was "a transformational experience" for the students.
Tatum and her husband, Travis Tatum, had two careers to launch, and they were starting a family. From Santa Barbara, they went to western Massachusetts, Tatum's home state, first at Westfield State College. Then, in pursuit of more time for research and writing, she moved to Mount Holyoke College in nearby South Hadley. Her 1992 Harvard Educational Review article, “Talking about Race, Learning about Racism: An Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom," put her on the road to being an acknowledged expert.
In 1997, Tatum published Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, an exploration of the psychology of racial and ethnic identity, which garnered a great deal of attention. In 2017, to mark the book's 20th anniversary, Tatum, who lives in Atlanta, updated the psychological research, revised and augmented the content throughout, and added a new epilogue "intended to remind the reader that change is possible, even in the face of the current political climate," Tatum says.
When the book first came out, Tatum had been at Mount Holyoke for eight years. Looking for a new challenge, she took on the role of dean of the college, and then of acting president while then-president Joanne Creighton went on sabbatical. Tatum enjoyed being able to put her ideas into action as an administrator, and soon accepted the job as ninth president of Spelman College, a thrilling assignment, she says.
"If you grow up black in the United States, particularly as a young black woman, there are very few places where you can say, 'This place was built for me.' But that is what you can say when you come to Spelman," Tatum says.
Her goal was to make Spelman a top-flight college, and during her 13 years as president, a strategic plan strengthened the core curriculum and improved opportunities for research, service learning, international study, internships, and alumnae networking. Historic buildings were renovated; new buildings incorporated "green" standards. In 2014, Spelman College raised $157.8 million, the largest sum in the history of the institution; 71 percent of donors were alumnae.
In 2013, Tatum also shut down Spelman's $1 million Division III sports program — about 4 percent of the students played on its teams, she says — and put the money to work on establishing a "wellness revolution" program for the entire student body, emphasizing good health habits like fitness and nutrition, to impact more students with lifelong benefits, she says.
Tatum now spends a great deal of her time speaking across the country. She traces the major motifs of her career in part to the "insider-outsider experience" of a childhood spent in an engaged black family in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, a predominantly white community 30 miles outside of Boston where her father was an art professor at the state college. Her mother was a member of the Bridgewater school board and eventually taught in the public schools. Tatum, one of four children, was often the only African-American child in her classes and, because she skipped a grade, also the youngest. Still, "I always had a lot of confidence in myself as a student," she says.
She came of age at the height of the civil rights movement, which made its presence felt in Massachusetts, noticeably in school desegregation that led to race riots in Boston, which Tatum saw on television. "It wasn't part of my daily experience." Still, she recalls one classmate asking her about the racial tensions. "'I don't know. I live in Bridgewater,'" she replied.
So while her childhood was "pretty benign," she felt an increasing social isolation from peers she had known most of her life. "I was eager to get out of Bridgewater," she says.
In high school, she worked in the town library, where a favorite task was putting plastic jackets on new books. One of those was Dibs in Search of Selfopens in new window, by the psychologist Virginia M. Axline. "It was about a psychotherapist working with a young boy, and I was really fascinated by it. Based on that book, I decided I wanted to be a psychologist," she recalls.
Tatum was 16 years old when she graduated from high school. Both her parents were alumni of Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, DC, but her own sense of identity led her to choose Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Wesleyan had been an all-male institution, but was seeking to diversify across the board, Tatum says, which was one reason why she chose it.
After college, she started out in management training at the retail giant Sears, but that book she'd read in high school stayed with her. Tatum soon enrolled at the University of Michigan in clinical psychology, intending to practice. She met her husband in Ann Arbor. Even before she had finished her dissertation, he got a fellowship at UCSB, and they moved to California.
"And so I taught that class," she says, the one that changed her life. "I was 26 years old, wet behind the ears, as they say, a very inexperienced classroom teacher. But it went really well."
