Mazie O. Tyson

Tyson was originally from Jacksonville, Florida.[1] She attended Florida A & M College for two years, and graduated from Howard University in 1921.[2] In 1937 she earned a master's degree in geography at Ohio State University, with a thesis titled "A Florida Phosphate Landscape."[3] She did doctoral work at Syracuse University,[4] but health problems prevented the completion of her doctorate.[5]

Tyson taught at Bennett College,[6] Bethune-Cookman College,[7] Florida A & M College, and Southern University, before joining the geography department at Tennessee State College in 1946.[8] She taught there until 1969,[9][10] and was considered a "legend" by colleagues for her long teaching career.[11]

During World War II, Tyson headed a panel in Leon County, Florida, to monitor black businesses' compliance with wartime price regulations.[12] She wrote about war work in articles "War and Post-War Challenges to Geographers" (1944),[13] and "What Mobilization For Peace Can Learn From Mobilization For War" (1945).[14]

Tyson was active in the Nashville branch of the AAUW,[15][16] and in the sorority Zeta Phi Beta.[17] In 1954 and 1955,[18] she took leave from the college to work in the United States Virgin Islands as a teacher and consultant.[19]

Mazie Tyson married fellow professor Aurelius Southall Scott in 1928;[1] they ran a summer camp together in Ohio, and were on the faculty together at Bethune-Cookman College,[20] before they separated in the 1930s. She retired from teaching in 1970,[21] and died from cancer and heart failure at a hospital on Saint Thomas, in the Virgin Islands, in 1975.[22]