Mabel Smythe-Haith Papers

Mabel Murphy Smythe-Haith was born on April 3, 1918, to Harry Saunders and Josephine Dibble Murphy in Montgomery, Alabama. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta for three years and graduated from Mount Holyoke College with her BA in 1937. She married Hugh Heyne Smythe in 1939. In 1940 she earned her MA in economics from Northwestern University and her PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin in 1942.

From 1942-1945, Smythe-Haith was an assistant professor at Lincoln University in Missouri, and from 1945-1946, she was a professor at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State University. She and her husband were both visiting professors at Shiga University in Hikone, Japan, from 1951-1953. In 1954, she assumed the position of deputy director for nonlegal research for school desegregation cases for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Between 1954 and 1975, Smythe-Haith held several memberships on several federal committees and commissions, including the US Advisory Committee on Educational Exchange, US Advisory Commission on International Education and Cultural Affairs, the State Department's Advisory Council on African Affairs, US National Commission on UNESCO, and the US Commission on Civil Rights. President Lyndon Johnson appointed her US delegate to the 13th general conference of UNESCO in Paris, France, in 1964. Also during this time Smythe-Haith was an instructor and coordinating principle of New Lincoln High School in New York, a consultant for Encyclopedia Britannica, and director and then vice president for research and publications for the Phelps-Stokes Fund in New York.

After her husband's death in 1977, Smythe-Haith was appointed by President Jimmy Carter as US Ambassador to Cameroon and to Equatorial Guinea in 1979, when diplomatic relations were re-established with that country. Smythe-Haith was called back to the US in 1980 as deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the State Department. Upon President Regan's assumption of the presidency, Smythe-Haith resigned, returning to academia. She went to Northwestern University where she served first as the Melville J. Herskovits Professor and then as associate director of the African studies program. She became professor emerita in 1985, the same year she married her second husband, Robert Haith Jr., who passed away in 1998.

Mabel Smythe-Haith had one daughter, Karen Pamela Smythe. Smythe-Haith died from complications of Alzheimer's disease on February 7, 2006, in her home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.