Categories: Black History & Culture,
History does not disappear on its own. It is pushed aside, spoken over, and quietly removed from classrooms, screens, and public memory. ReShonda Tate writes against that silence. In her new novel, “With Love from Harlem,” Tate refuses the forgetting of Black women whose brilliance unsettled the nation that profited from it. She does so not only as a novelist but also as a journalist shaped by the Black Press, where history has long been preserved when others would not carry it.
The novel draws from the life of Hazel Scott, a prodigy whose hands moved faster than the limits imposed on her body, her politics, and her womanhood. Harlem in 1943 is alive in Tate’s telling, not as nostalgia, but as a site of labor, desire, and contradiction. Hazel is young and gifted and already negotiating a world that celebrates her talent while disciplining her autonomy.
Her relationship with Adam Clayton Powell Jr. becomes one of the book’s most searching inquiries. Powell is charismatic, married, and powerful. Hazel enters his life as a mistress, a choice Tate does not excuse or soften. Instead, she examines what it means for a young Black woman to be drawn toward power in a society that routinely withholds it. “She was married to Adam Clayton Powell Jr. She was his second wife. She started out as his mistress, a decision she regretted,” Tate said during her interview on Let It Be Known. “What happens when you become the wife is that the mistress spot is still open.”
This is not written for shock. It is written for truth. Tate insists on telling Hazel’s story whole, including the mistakes, the compromises, and the private grief that followed public acclaim. Hazel’s marriage demands that she dim herself so that Powell can shine. The cost of that bargain becomes central to the novel’s emotional weight.
“When two stars get together, one of them is bound to dim,” Tate said. “Her star had to dim in order for Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to shine, and how she ended up taking back her own.”
That reclamation is where the novel breathes. Hazel’s struggle is not only about love or marriage. It is about self-possession. It is about what Black women are asked to surrender in exchange for respectability and proximity to male authority. Tate allows Hazel to be ambitious, flawed, wounded, and defiant without apology.
The Harlem that surrounds Hazel is communal and crowded with genius. Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Nina Simone appear not as ornaments but as part of a living intellectual and artistic ecosystem. Their presence reinforces a truth the book holds close. Black excellence has always existed in relationships, even when history insists on isolating it.
Tate’s authority came from deep research and lived practice. She spent years in archives, libraries, the Black Press, and personal papers, often in Washington and California, refusing the shortcuts of surface-level history. Her grounding as a journalist, including her work within the Black Press, shapes how she approaches historical fiction. The facts are not decoration. They are the foundation.
“I love being able to introduce people to history, to entertain and educate at the same time,” Tate said. “I love resurrecting those icons that have been really erased from history.”
That commitment is inseparable from her respect for Black newspapers, which she credits as essential to her work.
“I wouldn’t be able to write any one of these books without the Black Press,” Tate said. “I got so much of my information from the Black newspapers. We are leaving a legacy that is helping educate the future.”
