Beverly Daniel Tatum is president emerita of Spelman College, where she served from 2002 until 2015. She is also a nationally recognized authority on race and education in America and a licensed clinical psychologist. Her critically acclaimed book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race (1997), was selected as multicultural book of the year in 1998 by the National Association for Multicultural Education and was re-released in an expanded 20th-anniversary edition in September 2017. She is also the author of Assimilation Blues: Black Families in a White Community (1987) and Can We Talk about Race? And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation (2007).
Tatum’s honors include an Academic Leadership Award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 2013 and the American Psychological Association’s Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology in 2014. She earned a BA in psychology from Wesleyan University (CT) and MA and PhD degrees in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan, as well as an MA in religious studies from Hartford Seminary. Before her term at Spelman she served as a faculty member, department chair, dean of the college, vice president for student affairs, and acting president of Mount Holyoke College.