In Memoriam - Althea Tait

Dr. Althea Tait
May 6, 1976 - July 25, 2023

Professor Althea Tait of State University of New York, the College at Brockport, led a life dedicated to Black youth literature, Black women’s literature, and African American poetry and literary theory, sharing her insights and activism with students, colleagues, and scholars in multiple institutional and community spaces. I Die Daily: Police Brutality, Black Bodies, and the Force of Children’s Literature, forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi, is co-edited with Prof. Michelle Hite. True to Dr. Tait’s way of moving through the world, she has written honestly in this book about the murder of Black youth in literature and the systems that operate in America to allow racism, oppression, incarceration and the killing of young Black bodies to continue. Dr. Tait’s critical voice was absolutely distinctive. Drawing on her capacious research across fields and her penchant for pulling wisdom from historical and contemporary events in the same breath, her arguments are intellectually rich and emotionally stunning; her essays model for us the best in engaged, provocative, generative scholarship. Her work in the forthcoming book and in her searingly brilliant articles will reverberate for years to come. 

Anyone who has ever had an academic conversation with Dr. Tait soon came to realize that she had nearly perfect recall of quotes from key Black creators and would recite Tupac lyrics alongside truths from W.E.B Du Bois and Sojourner Truth--sometimes in the same sentence. Dr. Tait was a phenomenal scholar who changed the lives and minds of students at many universities.  Interdisciplinarity also permeated Dr. Tait’s teaching and scholarship, through which she stretched her students to new understandings of texts, culture and the human condition. Her passion for teaching was obvious, but she also insisted upon interdisciplinary thinking in her students, which presented a serious challenge to those accustomed to thinking narrowly and in siloed ways about genre and discipline and who might consider “low art” (popular culture) beneath their consideration. Dr. Tait equalized the analytical playing field by, for instance, throwing rap and hip hop alongside visual art, the Civil Rights struggle, and what was on the news last night. She gave equal weight to ideas from disparate fields and time periods and truly embodied what it means to teach for social justice. 

We both met Althea through ChLA, mentored her and were mentored by her, and we appreciated the distinctive ethical perspective she brought to the organization and to the field. In July 2020, Althea issued a powerful letter to the ChLA membership, calling out to our field. She wrote: “I believe, now more than ever, as you find yourselves in interventional positions as administrators, publishers, editors, colleagues, mentors, friends, allies and/or activists, Black lives—all of them in their complex and overlapping contexts—need to be a priority. I challenge you to see where you have been complicit with the moments where Black lives are gently moved into the margins in between the killings.” In losing Althea, we have lost a brilliant, expansive, allusive, poetic writer and thinker and a deeply spiritual human being. We have lost a theorist and creative thinker who challenged the field to address its ongoing failures and erasures. We have lost a colleague who called on each of us to cultivate empathy daily, to learn and teach across disciplinary boundaries, and to move through the world with love, intentionality, and integrity.

Althea Tait was a social justice warrior in youth literature. Through carrying this work forward in ChLA, we can honor her legacy. We’re embracing that challenge. Will you?

Michelle H. Martin
Katharine Capshaw