American Experience (1988) s34e02 Episode Script
The American Diplomat
1
♪
♪
NARRATOR:
In the fall of 1948,
a young African American lawyer
and his wife
crossed an ocean
to begin a new job.
Edward R. Dudley had just been
named the United States Minister
to the West African nation
of Liberia.
EDWARD R. DUDLEY:
As the boat docked
on that very bright morning,
two of us were standing
at the rail,
we saw thousands of people.
It was rather
an exhilarating experience.
♪
We could see the new frontiers
opening up.
NARRATOR:
It was a time of titanic
struggles
between competing ideologies:
communism versus capitalism;
white supremacy
versus Black liberation;
colonialism
versus self-rule.
A racially segregated
United States
was positioning itself
as the leader
of a mostly non-white world.
(Castro speaking Spanish)
ROBESON TAJ FRAZIER:
It's difficult for us
to fully conceptualize what
it meant to be Black
in spaces of government during
that time period.
Then to have to represent
U.S. interests
and help cultivate the narrative
of U.S. democracy
for non-U.S. publics.
NARRATOR:
In the decades to come,
three Black diplomats
Edward R. Dudley,
Terence Todman, and Carl Rowan
would challenge the foundations
of American diplomacy
and try to change the way
America represented itself
to the world.
CARL ROWAN:
Sure, we're going to be
criticized.
It's because we're talking
about the things
that the United States
stands for,
the things that the
United States seeks to be.
NARRATOR:
They would challenge not only
the State Department,
but U.S. foreign policy itself.
DUDLEY:
Washington got accustomed
to my taking strong
independent stands
because the United States had a
revolution for our independence,
and we should be supportive
of independence.
NARRATOR:
These three diplomats
would also challenge
an unequal system
that had long determined
who should represent
America overseas.
DUDLEY:
If one was an ambassador,
there was a feeling that
this man was a true
representative of a country.
ANDERSON:
For diplomats,
you're fighting America
so that it can live up to what
it says it is,
while you're also fighting
for America.
That is no easy walk.
♪
(applause)
NARRATOR:
On March 12,
1947,
President Harry S. Truman
articulated a policy
that would come to be known
as the Truman Doctrine.
♪
HARRY S. TRUMAN:
At the present moment
in world history,
nearly every nation must choose
between alternative
ways of life.
If we falter in our leadership,
we may endanger
the peace of the world,
and we shall surely endanger
the welfare of this nation.
NARRATOR:
This was the cornerstone
of American foreign policy
in the Cold War
with the Soviet Union,
the idea that undemocratic
regimes anywhere
were a threat to freedom
everywhere.
Truman promised
that the United States
would do everything in its power
to stop the spread of communism
in any nation in the world.
NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
Already an iron curtain had
dropped around Poland, Hungary,
Yugoslavia, Bulgaria
Menace to the security
and institutions
of democratic government.
This truly a war of ideas.
NARRATOR:
The post-war world
was now a chessboard in
a high-stakes match between
democracy and communism.
The United States
and the Soviet Union battled
to win the hearts and minds
of neutral nations
all over the globe.
(man shouting indistinctly)
ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH:
In nations that are becoming
independent, how do they
maneuver in a world in which
the U.S. and the
Soviet Union have demanded
that people choose sides?
At the heart of the Cold War
were struggles over narrative.
♪
The Achilles heel for the
United States is its history
of racialized violence,
oppression,
and injustice against
people of color in the United
States and elsewhere.
MARY DUDZIAK:
How the United States treated
its own citizens mattered
diplomatically
in a way that it hadn't before.
♪
CAROL ANDERSON:
Black veterans were coming back
from the Second World War,
and they were demanding
the democracy that they
had fought so hard for.
There were a series of horrific
lynchings in 1946.
♪
and Truman is just absolutely
horrified.
Truman understood that
if the U.S. wanted the world
to believe them
when they said that they were
offering a democracy
that would benefit all,
then they needed to show
that they could offer that
democracy at home.
NARRATOR:
In 1948, President Truman
made a bold step:
he issued executive orders
to desegregate the military
and the civil service.
With a tough re-election
looming,
he looked to strengthen his ties
to the African American
community.
When the post of Minister
to Liberia became available,
Truman's team asked
Walter White,
the head of the N.A.A.C.P.,
the nation's most influential
civil rights organization,
to recommend a candidate.
White suggested a sharp
N.A.A.C.P. lawyer,
Edward R. Dudley.
At 37, Edward Dudley of
Roanoke, Virginia,
had already had
a storied career.
♪
DUDLEY:
I was 23 years old.
I came to New York, bright,
fresh, full of vinegar.
I applied for a job as
an assistant stage manager
at the Lafayette Theater
in Harlem.
(cheers and applause)
Orson Welles came to work
with us
and directed a Haitian Macbeth.
Lay on, Macduff!
And damn'd be he who first
cries, "Hold, enough!"
(stage fighting, yelling)
DUDLEY:
I saw no real future
in New York theaters.
Stagehands were not permitted
to work below 125th Street.
♪
So I decided to go to
law school.
NARRATOR:
In 1943, Thurgood Marshall,
the head of the N.A.A.C.P.'s
Legal Defense Fund,
hired Dudley to assist
with his strategy
of dismantling inequality
one case at a time.
For five years,
the two men crossed the country,
filing, and winning,
anti-discrimination lawsuits.
But now, President Truman was
asking Edward Dudley
to be the face of America
in Liberia.
♪
DUDLEY:
In Liberia,
the staff at the legation
welcomed us.
Shortly thereafter,
we engaged in the task
of diplomacy.
We get in touch
with the other members
of the diplomatic corps.
There's a parade,
view the troops.
This is big diggins in
small countries.
And all of a sudden,
you're catapulted
into this kind of thing.
And then you do the best
you can.
EDWARD DUDLEY, JR.:
My father was a risk taker.
I was six when I first joined
them
in Liberia.
My mother did most
of the raising.
(children speaking indistinctly)
My father was
the disciplinarian.
He was a very confident man.
♪
NARRATOR:
Like all political appointees,
Dudley served at the
pleasure of the president.
(cheering)
With the 1948 presidential
election
only a few months away
and Truman trailing badly
in the polls,
Dudley believed his time in
Liberia would be short-lived.
DUDLEY:
And we woke up and Harry Truman
was the president.
Rather than stay a few months
in Africa, we stayed five years.
NARRATOR:
Dudley's staff included
a small community of
African American diplomats.
Some had been in Liberia
for years,
and experienced more freedom
there than they could have
in the segregated United States.
(croquet mallet thwacks ball)
♪
They shared a commitment
to institution-building and
felt pride in the knowledge
that they were a part of
a pivotal moment in history
in a rapidly changing Africa.
A vital American ally
in World War II,
Liberia had provided
critical rubber supplies
and the site
for a military base.
But now, American attention
had shifted toward
African countries on the brink
of independence
nations whose loyalties
in the Cold War hung
in the balance.
Dudley faced a delicate task.
BRENDA GAYLE PLUMMER:
President Tubman felt
Liberia was being neglected
and is not getting
the kind of foreign assistance
that it deserved.
So Dudley's representing
the United States
when that traditional
relationship
is beginning to shift.
NARRATOR:
To underscore Liberia's
importance as an ally,
the United States elevated
the status
of the American Legation
to an Embassy a shift
that made Dudley a pioneer
for Black diplomats.
DUDLEY:
I became the first ambassador
of color from the United States.
♪
Ambassador, being the highest
diplomatic rank in Liberia,
this mantle fell upon
my shoulders.
MICHAEL KRENN:
When he was raised
to the ambassadorial level,
he was not simply going
to push papers
and have photo ops,
he wanted to do things
in Liberia.
♪
There was heavy U.S. investment
in the country.
Firestone and other American
companies that were there
considered themselves
almost as invaders
that conquered pieces of land
and used them as they wished.
NARRATOR:
Ambassador Dudley's task
was to balance
American interests
with Liberian progress.
The key was an initiative
called Point Four.
(newsreel music playing)
NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah,
Prime Minister of the Gold
Coast, arrives in Liberia.
A portion of his visit
is spent surveying
Point Four activity in Liberia.
♪
NARRATOR:
Point Four was President
Truman's ambitious
international aid program.
It sent American expertise,
money, and supplies
to developing nations,
demonstrating the
considerable benefits
of being an American ally.
♪
DUDLEY, JR.:
My father dove into this.
We're going to help them
with bridges,
with roads, with health,
education.
My father could see
the results
and to see the change.
♪
ANDERSON:
The significance of
Edward Dudley
being the first
African American ambassador
is huge.
It is part of the struggle
of the recognition of merit.
NARRATOR:
It had taken the United States
160 years.
(bell clanging)
The State Department
was created in 1789.
Its diplomats,
appointed by presidents,
had always been the face
of America in foreign lands.
Yet the State Department
had a very limited vision
of who should represent America
to the world.
KRENN:
During Reconstruction, there
were a few African Americans
appointed as diplomats.
In 1869, Ebenezer Bassett
was the first
African American diplomat.
He was sent as
a minister to Haiti.
Frederick Douglass was appointed
to that same position.
So there were opportunities,
but they were very,
very small opportunities.
PLUMMER:
The State Department had
the well-deserved reputation
of being extremely elitist.
It was the bailiwick
of Boston Brahmins.
Pale, male, and Yale.
♪
NARRATOR:
After World War I,
Congress attempted
to professionalize
the diplomatic corps.
KRENN:
The Rogers Act, 1924,
set up the Foreign Service exam
that had to be taken
by every candidate.
It was supposed to set up
a merit-based system.
NARRATOR:
The legislation seemed to be
a revolution in the making.
In theory, anyone who passed
the rigorous test
could join the Foreign Service.
And in 1925, a law clerk named
Clifton Wharton
easily passed the written exam.
KRENN:
So there was this wide
assumption that he was white.
And then he came for
the oral part of his exam,
and was very hastily
sent off to Liberia.
They didn't even send him
to the Foreign Service school
for training.
♪
NARRATOR:
Only four more African Americans
were accepted
into the diplomatic corps
over the next 25 years.
KRENN:
The chairman of Foreign Service
personnel, Joseph Grew,
stated very clearly that
African Americans, women,
Jewish Americans
would be quietly,
but effectively, excluded.
Even if they passed through
the written exam,
they would be shuffled away
through the oral examination.
MAN:
As Foreign Service Officers,
you are sample Americans,
and many people abroad
will think better or worse,
of the United States because
of what you do.
(applause)
♪
DUDLEY:
I used to come back to
Washington,
in a circle with nothing
but white people,
and I'd be introduced as
ambassador to Liberia.
And none of them would ever
hear that
because they would turn to me
and ask me,
"How do you like our country?"
talking about America.
The fact of the matter was,
they could never conceive that
a Black man could ever be
an ambassador.
♪
NARRATOR:
Dudley's sense of doing good
work in Liberia
was soon tempered by the reality
for African American diplomats.
He realized they were stuck
in an international loop
that was limiting
their professional growth
and their ability to advance.
DUDLEY:
In Liberia, the Black Foreign
Service Officers
had never had the opportunity
of serving anywhere else
in the world,
despite the fact that
it was a State Department policy
to rotate officers
every two years,
none had ever gotten outside
of a little triumvirate
called Monrovia,
Ponta Delgado,
and Madagascar.
And this had been going on
for year
after year, after year.
ANDERSON:
The State Department had
what they called the
Negro Circuit.
They put them in places where
there were already Black people.
And Dudley looked at a system
that had been in place
for decades and said, "No."
♪
DUDLEY:
We put together a memorandum
documenting
every Black
in the Foreign Service
over a long period of years.
♪
When they came into the service,
how long they had been in,
and the fact that they
had never been transferred.
We added a class of white
Foreign Service Officers.
In every instance,
they had had four, five,
and six transfers,
and had been in different posts
throughout the world.
♪
You had these
Foreign Service Officers
well-trained, highly educated
Being placed simply
in the Negro Circuit.
It makes it really hard
to do the work of America when
you know that you have been
Jim Crowed by your
own government.
♪
NARRATOR:
The former lawyer quickly saw
that the Negro Circuit
directly violated the
Foreign Service Act of 1946.
It was a law whose central
purpose
was to make the Foreign Service
stronger and more efficient.
But with Truman pushing
for desegregation,
the Act also stated a goal of
"eliminating conditions
favorable
to inbred prejudice
and caste spirit."
DUDLEY:
My entire background had been
with the National Association
for the Advancement
of Colored People.
And I knew exactly what to do.
I asked for an audience with
the Undersecretary of State,
John Peurifoy, and sat in
his office while he read it.
And he was visibly disturbed,
and asked me what I was going
to do with it.
I indicated that
it was his responsibility
to correct
an unwholesome situation,
but in my judgment,
an illegal situation.
Within six months,
transfers came through
and the number one
Foreign Service Officer
was sent to Paris, France.
And this is the first time that
a Black Foreign Service Officer
had ever served in Europe.
A second Foreign Service Officer
was sent to Zurich, Switzerland.
And a young lady of great talent
was sent to Rome, Italy.
(cheers and applause)
NARRATOR:
In 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower
was elected president.
Eisenhower was a war hero,
not a career politician.
Raised in Kansas,
he came from a world
where segregation
was the law of the land.
LENTZ-SMITH:
His State Department
is hostile, certainly,
to decolonizing nations
and uninterested in any kind
of meaningful
African American
diplomatic service.
♪
NARRATOR:
Eisenhower's election
meant Dudley's time
as ambassador was over.
Before the new administration
took office,
Dudley officially documented
his strong objection
to maintaining the status quo
in his resignation letter.
He argued,
"Black Foreign Service Officers
must have equal opportunity
for assignments worldwide."
The Negro Circuit had to end.
He made a Cold War argument
that I'm not asking you just
as a moral imperative.
You've got to do good
for these three-quarters
of the world's people
who are looking at America
to see whether
it will live up to its promise
of democracy and freedom.
And here's a way to do it.
NARRATOR:
In 1953,
Dudley left
the State Department,
returning to the N.A.A.C.P.
and the wider struggle
for Civil Rights in America.
♪
In the early 1950s,
the United States rode a wave
of prosperity.
But while the country was locked
into a brutal war in Korea,
the nation also agonized
over the Soviet threat
of nuclear devastation,
(siren blaring)
and a growing fear of communism
within America.
(plane engines droning)
NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
Holidays,
vacation time, we must be ready
to do the right thing
if the atomic bomb explodes.
Duck and cover!
(explosion)
NARRATOR:
Senator Joseph McCarthy
of Wisconsin
sensationally claimed
that hundreds of communist spies
had infiltrated
the State Department.
JOSEPH MCCARTHY:
Plans have been discussed
by the Soviet secret police
to obtain blank
American passports
from communists
employed in the
State Department.
NARRATOR:
American government agencies
and showboating Congressmen
falsely linked civil rights
organizations with communism.
For aspiring Black diplomats,
this created yet another barrier
to a career in
the State Department.
Secretary of State
John Foster Dulles
said none of these Negroes
can get through with
"lily white" clearance.
ANDERSON:
Think about what that
is really saying.
It's saying that
Black folks can't be trusted
with American democracy.
So we can't have them in our
mainline bureaucracies
doing the work of America.
♪
NARRATOR:
One ambitious young man refused
to be deterred.
In 1952, a 26-year-old
from the U.S. Virgin Islands
named Terence Todman passed a
written federal service exam,
and was offered a job
at the State Department.
But then he arrived
for his first day of work.
TERENCE TODMAN:
The head of personnel said that
we note your accent isn't
a hundred percent American,
and we can't afford to have
anyone
in the Foreign Service who isn't
immediately identifiable as
American.
JAMES DANDRIDGE:
The accent wasn't
the defining reason.
That was the expressed reason.
The real reason is you
you're Black.
You are not really
fully American.
NARRATOR:
But Todman persisted.
He argued his case up the ladder
to the head of the office.
TODMAN:
Ambassador Whitman said,
there's a great deal
of work to be done
in this office.
We cannot afford to hire
a "showpiece."
I said, "Sir, if your job was
a showpiece, I wouldn't want it.
I think too highly of myself
to take a job like that."
And he said,
"Okay, we'll take you on."
♪
DORIS TODMAN:
Terence was born in St. Thomas,
Virgin Islands.
Race was not an issue.
Just being raised
in the Virgin Islands,
it sort of gave you a sense
of who you are.
♪
He grew up very poor.
We were in the same class.
He's quite bossy, by the way.
He was very, very smart.
I remember my great-grandmother
saying,
"That young man, whoever he is,
is going places."
NARRATOR:
In 1945, at age 19,
Todman had been drafted
into the Army.
He took the officer's candidate
exam in Spanish and English,
and passed both.
Then he was shipped out
to Japan,
where he discovered his calling.
TODMAN:
I learned to speak Japanese,
and I spoke to my fellow
officers
and heard the misconceptions
they had about the Japanese.
And I would tell them
what the Japanese were like.
And speaking to the Japanese,
the misconceptions
they had about Americans
(chuckling):
were so great,
that I found myself
telling the Japanese
about Americans.
And I realized that a lot of
difficulties arose
from people not knowing
about each other.
And that became critical
to my thinking
about what I would do
afterwards.
This was the eye-opening
experience
that propelled his interests
into Foreign Service.
If he could be as successful
as a communicator
in the military,
why not seek an opportunity
to apply those
skills as a diplomat?
♪
NARRATOR:
Terence Todman began
as a Foreign Service
desk officer in Washington D.C.,
monitoring U.S. relations
with three Asian nations.
From the beginning,
his colleagues didn't know
what to make of his presence.
TODMAN:
When they came to speak
to the Nepal desk officer,
they'd walk in,
see me behind a desk,
and wonder,
what are you doing there?
There'd be real amazement,
just to the idea
of an African American
in an officer position.
DORIS TODMAN:
Being a diplomatic wife
was a full-time job.
There was so much work
dealing with three countries,
India, Ceylon, and Nepal.
He'd bring the newspapers
home for me to read.
I would underline
what was important
and give him a briefing.
I was a part of it.
NARRATOR:
Todman's first overseas
assignment was India.
But first, he had
to take language training
in Hindustani at the
Foreign Service Institute.
This was Virginia in 1957,
where segregation was legal.
TODMAN:
My first day, the white officers
went across the street
into a restaurant.
And I was not allowed
to go there because
Black Americans couldn't
go into their restaurants.
So I went to the
State Department and said,
"This can't go."
State Department said,
"These are Virginia laws,
"a lot of people have come here
and haven't said
anything about it."
And I said, "Well,
I'm not other people,
and you're doing
something that's not right."
DANDRIDGE:
And he said to the Department
of State, "You have a problem.
"I don't have a problem.
This is not about me."
♪
NARRATOR:
Todman later said,
"I was considered
a troublemaker,
and that was all right."
KRENN:
Todman knew that
institutional culture
wasn't going
to change on its own.
It was going to change
by being confronted,
by being embarrassed.
And he kept up such
a firestorm of protest
that eventually
the Department of State
rented half of the restaurant.
There finally was a
desegregated cafeteria
for Foreign Service Officers.
NARRATOR:
While Terence Todman
was confronting racism
inside the State Department,
the U.S. government
was confronting
a Soviet information campaign
focused on highlighting
America's racial violence.
A large part of the Cold War
was a battle
of public relations.
Which side would be
better at selling itself?
(horns honking)
To counter Soviet
propaganda worldwide,
Eisenhower created the United
States Information Agency,
the U.S.I.A.
NICHOLAS CULL:
As a one-stop shop for American
foreign policy information,
U.S.I.A. has an astonishing
range of outlets.
It had Voice of America radio.
(speaking non-English languages)
CULL:
It had libraries.
It gets U.S.I.A. material in
front of millions of people
and is a tremendous part of how
the United States
is perceived in the world.
NARRATOR:
The crucial audiences
for the American message
were countries that hadn't
taken sides in the Cold War,
the non-aligned nations.
Terence Todman was sent
to the most important
neutral nation of all India.
BRENDA GAYLE PLUMMER:
India had been one
of the countries
most critical of the
United States' race relations.
It was a country that was
independent of the Soviets.
It was a very
influential country.
Indian opinion was important.
NARRATOR:
As the Todman
family looked to India
for their first
overseas posting,
the eyes of the world
were focused
on Little Rock, Arkansas.
♪
(crowd clamoring)
PLUMMER:
One of the interesting aspects
of the Civil Rights
controversies
of the late '50s was
they were televised.
NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
Little Rock, Arkansas.
The white population are
determined to prevent
colored students from
going to the school
their own children attend.
PLUMMER:
This was one of the first times
in U.S. history
when racial violence
could be seen all
over the world.
ANDERSON:
You've got nine
Black honor students,
just trying to go to school,
just trying to get an education.
We see white mobs, angry mobs,
trying to get at the kids.
(crowd shouting)
MARY DUDZIAK:
The "Times of India"
tracked it day by day.
Race was undermining the ability
of the United States to appeal
to emerging new nations.
And it raised questions
"Why should we be your ally when
you treat people who
look like me this way?"
NARRATOR:
The governor of Arkansas
sent in the National Guard
to block the Black students
and keep the school segregated.
For three weeks, the president
of the United States
did nothing at all.
ANDERSON:
The Soviets were all on top
of the explosion at Little Rock.
You see the frustration
in the administration,
in the State Department,
calling it propaganda.
It is a way for them
to strip it of its truth.
It's not propaganda
if it's true.
Our enemies are gloating
over this incident
and using it everywhere to
misrepresent our whole nation.
Little Rock will return
to its normal habits
of peace and order.
Thus will be restored
the image of America
and of all its parts.
(crowd clamoring)
LENTZ-SMITH:
Eisenhower deploys
federal troops.
He ultimately does it
for these questions
of American credibility
in international coverage,
not because it's
the right thing to do.
NARRATOR:
As America continued to
reveal its faults to the world,
it was a frustrating time
for Terence Todman
to be a Foreign Service
Officer abroad.
"We were putting out
a lot of information,
which no one paid
any attention to,"
he would later say.
"If we assigned a couple
of Black officers
"to positions
in those embassies,
"their very presence,
as Black Americans
in official positions, would
tell the story far better."
And for Doris Todman,
it was difficult to be overseas
watching the Civil Rights
struggle unfold
half a world away.
DORIS TODMAN:
Well, I would say,
"Why am I here?
I should be out there
marching," you know.
And he said, "Look,
we serve a purpose, too.
We're showing what
America could be."
DANDRIDGE:
He was concerned that
we represent the truth
and not painting over of
American culture and society.
He had a job to do,
to represent the
United States of America,
the good, the bad, and the ugly.
And if it was ugly,
he said it's ugly.
(crowd clamoring)
NARRATOR:
By the late 1950s,
people throughout
Asia and Africa
were fighting for
self-determination
against colonial powers.
But Eisenhower failed
to see a connection between
liberation movements in Africa
and civil rights in America.
He saw action against
colonial governments
as communist-inspired.
LENTZ-SMITH:
Deeply embedded in U.S. values
in the 1950s was
an understanding of
white people at the
top of a heap of worth
and capability, and
Black people, Asians, you know,
Indigenous people
controlling their own destinies,
would mean chaos and upheaval,
is deeply rooted in
racialized understandings
of who has the capacity
for self-government.
TODMAN:
While serving
on U.S. delegations,
I noticed the
United States going along
with what the British
and French were doing
in dragging their feet
and not keeping up to
their sacred trust of bringing
these countries
to self-government.
And I kept insisting
that the U.S. policy
should be in keeping
with our own history
and our own principles,
and that we should
not be going along
with what these colonial
powers were doing.
KRENN: Todman represented
the sort of young lions
coming in,
confronting this idea within
the State Department
that the real experts on Africa
are the old colonialists.
♪
NARRATOR:
In 1960, liberation
movements in Asia and Africa
were transforming
global politics.
That year alone,
17 African nations won
their struggle for independence.
Eisenhower left office in 1961,
just as the movement
for civil rights at home was
growing stronger by the year.
In his winning campaign,
John F. Kennedy
had promised to support
both civil rights
and African independence.
KENNEDY:
The great battleground
for the defense and expansion
of freedom today is the whole
southern half of the globe
Asia, Latin America,
Africa, and the Middle East,
the lands of the rising people.
NARRATOR:
But for all his rhetoric,
the new president
mainly focused on one problem
Stopping the expansion
of communist power.
Now he looked for
someone he could trust
to communicate his
policies to the world.
Oh, New Year's Day of 1961,
I was lying in bed
in Pasadena waiting
for the Rose Bowl game to start,
when I got a telephone call
asking if I'd come down
to Washington as Deputy
Assistant Secretary of State.
Wow, that must've
been an exciting call.
Well, it, uh there
were a lot of days
during those
four-and-a-half years
when I wished I'd
never gotten the call.
(audience laughter)
NARRATOR:
By the time he
received that call,
Carl Rowan was already a
nationally known journalist.
During the 1960 campaign,
he'd written
a series of articles for
a Republican-owned newspaper
on Democratic candidate John
F. Kennedy that Kennedy found
surprisingly fair.
Six months later,
the new president offered
the young journalist the job
of Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State
for Public Affairs.
Carl Rowan would communicate
Kennedy's policies
to journalists around the world.
JEFFREY ROWAN:
He wanted his voice to be heard.
He wanted a seat at the table
in both domestic
and international policy making.
♪
NARRATOR:
The appointment made
Rowan the highest-ranking
African American official
in the State Department.
It was a remarkable
accomplishment,
especially for someone
who'd grown up in a family
of five in a small house
with no electricity
in McMinnville, Tennessee.
ROWAN:
His mother was
a cleaner for houses
and his dad really didn't
bring in a consistent income.
That led to squabbles
between his parents.
Those were very
difficult times for him.
NARRATOR:
From the beginning,
Carl Rowan
was driven to succeed.
He was valedictorian
of his high school class,
and went to Tennessee
State University.
Then he became one of the first
African American officers
in the history of the U.S. Navy.
But when he came back
home to Tennessee,
he was still a
second class citizen.
♪
He decided to
become a journalist.
He would tell the ugly truth
about racism in the South.
ROWAN:
In 1948, I got a job with
the "Minneapolis Tribune"
at a time when very few
daily newspapers
were hiring Negroes as writers.
In 1951,
I suggested to the editors
that we had a responsibility
to tell the people
of this state something about
the Negro citizens
of this nation.
NARRATOR:
The 18-part series called
"How Far From Slavery?"
was a sensation,
and made Rowan's career.
KRENN:
Rowan portrayed the racial
problems in a very specific way.
That really all we're talking
about are a few Southern states,
these holdouts, who
don't really agree with
the vast majority of Americans.
ROBESON TAJ FRAZIER:
He had a viewpoint that
working class people,
when given opportunity,
can participate
in ideals
of American citizenship.
♪
NARRATOR:
In 1954, Rowan took his idea
of the American dream
overseas to India,
as part of a lecture series
sponsored by the State
Department.
FRAZIER:
Part of the agenda
is for him to represent
someone who has
been able to uproot themselves
from abject poverty.
He's there to represent
possibilities
of life in the United States.
It perpetuates the kind
of dominant U.S. ethos
of individualism,
which completely negates
the reality that
Rowan was an anomaly.
NARRATOR:
One evening, an Indian
journalist introduced Rowan
as an "excellent
propagandist for America,"
saying, "We are all
interested in how a man
"with a Black skin,
who has been unable to know
freedom, can talk so learnedly
about a free society."
It was an uncomfortable moment,
and it reconstructed
Rowan's view of the world.
KRENN:
Rowan believed that these
attacks were communist inspired.
That's what he was facing
misconceptions, lies,
distorted stories.
NARRATOR:
"I was not a State
Department lackey,"
Rowan would later write.
"I simply went from Darjeeling,
to Patna, to Cuttack,
"to Madras, saying good
things about my country
"because I believed that
the society that had given me
"a break was in
the process of taking
great strides toward
racial justice."
LENTZ-SMITH:
The first word for
him is "patriot."
And that's a
complicated thing for
a Black man to be
in the mid-1950s.
So he is critical of the U.S.,
but he also sees promise,
he believes that
American democracy
would be good for the world,
and for decolonizing nations.
♪
NARRATOR:
Rowan became friendly
with Vice President
Lyndon Johnson on a 1961 trip
through Asia, including Vietnam,
where the U.S.
was already
becoming entangled in a war.
♪
Their friendship
fueled Rowan's ambition,
but it led to frustration,
as well.
"I suppose it's natural that
"anyone who travels with
and advises a vice president
would develop some sense
of self-esteem," he later wrote.
"I took on a sense
of self-importance that
"had nothing to do with reality.
I forgot," he wrote,
"that I was just another Negro."
FRAZIER:
He describes
the State Department
as a virtual plantation.
It's very much a kind
of white male culture.
And this is a space that he
is forced to make sense of.
He does push for more,
you know, people of color,
Black people, to be hired.
ROWAN: The fact that I'd come in
as the first deputy assistant
secretary,
we launched a mighty campaign
to integrate the
Foreign Service to the point
that it looked reasonably like
the population
of the United States.
NARRATOR:
But the pace of change was slow.
After two years,
Rowan was ready
to leave the department.
Instead, Kennedy offered
him an ambassadorship
to Finland, and Rowan took it.
AURELIA BRAZEAL:
The currency of
diplomacy is optimism.
You have to be optimistic
as a diplomat.
And that leads to seeing
issues as opportunities.
♪
REPORTER:
And now you're here and
we hope that you will
like to stay here with us.
I know we're going
to enjoy it immensely.
And we look forward
to seeing all of this
country and as many of
Finland's people as possible.
ROWAN:
The Finns did
magazine articles galore.
I remember one in one of
the big Finnish magazines,
the most colorful ambassador
in Finland.
(laughs)
They were talking
about the unorthodox style
that I brought to the job,
in the sense of traveling
more than any
American had before,
and going out bowling
with the Finnish people.
♪
JEFFREY ROWAN:
People would walk up
to us and stare,
but it wasn't a kind
of racist staring.
They were just curious
because they had never
really seen people
of color before.
♪
NARRATOR:
For Rowan,
being a Black ambassador
in Finland had a subtext.
He wrote,
"I could belie the notion
that my country was
hopelessly racist."
Rowan said,
"My coming to Finland would
"hasten the day when
American Negroes are
playing the role they ought to
play in our Foreign Service."
Finland was a
critical country for
a president preoccupied with
drawing the line
against Communism.
The Soviet Union loomed
large on Finland's border.
Ambassador Rowan was now
on the frontlines
of the Cold War.
KRENN:
Finland was a hotspot.
Finland was seen
as sort of a nation
on the fence in the Cold War.
This was a nation we really
had to curry their favor.
We know the Soviets were also
trying to curry their favor.
(explosion)
NARRATOR:
The U.S. and the
Soviet Union had enough
nuclear weapons to destroy
the other many times over.
Kennedy urged the
world's leaders to sign
a partial test ban,
and Kennedy's
directive to Rowan was clear
persuade Finland's president,
Urho Kekkonen,
to support an
international treaty.
KENNEDY:
Let us call a truce to terror.
The logical place
to begin is a treaty
assuring the end
of nuclear tests
of all kinds,
in every environment.
♪
NARRATOR:
Rowan succeeded in getting
Kekkonen to join the effort.
This was his greatest
accomplishment as an ambassador.
But his stay was cut short
on November 22, 1963.
NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
In winter's darkness,
all men await the new
president's guidance.
His cabinet puts before him a
Congress deadlocked in debate,
the torment of a nation
on the edge of racial clash.
With steadying certainty,
Lyndon Johnson takes over.
NARRATOR:
When Lyndon Johnson
became president,
he entered office with an
ambitious civil rights agenda.
The first step
would be to appoint
African Americans
to high office.
I, Carl T. Rowan,
do solemnly swear
NARRATOR:
He named Rowan the director
of the United States
Information Agency.
That I will support
IRVIN HICKS JR:
The fact that here is
a very accomplished
African American
who has
been put into this position
and has the confidence
of the president
of the United States,
it was a major fanfare
as I was growing up
in African American
publications,
because it was unprecedented.
NARRATOR:
But it wasn't easy to be head
of the U.S.I.A. in the 1960s.
America's racial
unrest intensified,
while the country
spiraled deeper into
what many viewed
as an unjust war.
It was Rowan's job to protect
America's image overseas,
a position that
often put him at odds
with civil rights leaders.
ANDERSON:
Carl Rowan,
I would say, played it
too close to the vest.
There is an insurgency
in the Black community.
And so the kind of quiet,
patient gradualism
isn't playing
to that insurgency.
♪
KRENN:
It was a difficult time to be
a representative of a country
that still kept most of your
fellow African Americans
in second-class citizenship.
Well, which United States
do they represent?
Do they represent
the United States that
they are supposed to represent,
as the paragon of freedom,
democracy, and justice,
or do they represent
the America which is
a segregated, divided,
and sometimes racially
violent society?
(shouting, clamoring)
NARRATOR:
As the debacle
in Vietnam consumed LBJ,
Rowan felt increasingly cut out
of the decision-making process.
His relationship with
the president deteriorated.
In 1965, Rowan resigned.
BRAZEAL:
There were people
I knew who did resign.
As a country,
we lost their talent.
We lost their thinking
on policy issues.
It's hard to quantify
what you've lost,
but you do lose that
voice at the table.
LENTZ-SMITH:
It's easy to
enter an institution
and think you're
going to change it.
But if it's just you
or just a few of you,
how do you keep in mind the
purpose that you entered with
and how do you
fulfill that purpose?
NARRATOR: Both Carl Rowan
and Edward R. Dudley returned
to illustrious
careers outside diplomacy.
(indistinct chatter,
flashbulbs popping)
But Terence Todman dedicated
his life to the Foreign Service.
In 1989, the State
Department honored him
with the rank of
Career Ambassador,
the first African
American diplomat
to receive that distinction.
He served as an
ambassador for 23 years,
learned six languages,
and held six
ambassadorial positions.
HICKS:
That means that
on six occasions,
Ambassador Todman
received Senate confirmation.
On six occasions,
you had the confidence
of the president
of the United States.
That is that is highly unique.
♪
DORIS TODMAN:
We felt we were proving a point
because we had penetrated
an impenetrable area
in America, in diplomacy.
We felt that was important.
KRENN:
If we look at the late
1940s with Edward Dudley,
moving on through
Terence Todman,
moving up to the career
of Carl Rowan and beyond,
the question of progress,
it's a difficult one.
Has there been progress?
There has been progress.
But it's been an uphill battle.
The folks who are
in these bureaucracies,
which are often
very hostile places,
slowly chipping away
at the structures of inequality,
the structures
that suppress merit,
that just see your Blackness
and not your brilliance,
to have those folks
quietly doing that work,
this is that kind of
institutional systemic work
that creates change.
♪
♪
ANNOUNCER:
Next time,
she shot to stardom
MAN:
She never missed.
ANNOUNCER:
and became an American icon.
WOMAN:
There's never been anybody
like Annie Oakley.
WOMAN:
This sweet person,
but with this big-bang gun.
(gun fires)
ANNOUNCER: But at the height of
her popularity,
scandal threatened
to bring her down.
"Annie Oakley," next time
on "American Experience."
Made possible in part
by Liberty Mutual Insurance.
"American Experience:
The American Diplomat"
is available with PBS Passport
and on Amazon Prime Video.
♪
♪
♪
♪
NARRATOR:
In the fall of 1948,
a young African American lawyer
and his wife
crossed an ocean
to begin a new job.
Edward R. Dudley had just been
named the United States Minister
to the West African nation
of Liberia.
EDWARD R. DUDLEY:
As the boat docked
on that very bright morning,
two of us were standing
at the rail,
we saw thousands of people.
It was rather
an exhilarating experience.
♪
We could see the new frontiers
opening up.
NARRATOR:
It was a time of titanic
struggles
between competing ideologies:
communism versus capitalism;
white supremacy
versus Black liberation;
colonialism
versus self-rule.
A racially segregated
United States
was positioning itself
as the leader
of a mostly non-white world.
(Castro speaking Spanish)
ROBESON TAJ FRAZIER:
It's difficult for us
to fully conceptualize what
it meant to be Black
in spaces of government during
that time period.
Then to have to represent
U.S. interests
and help cultivate the narrative
of U.S. democracy
for non-U.S. publics.
NARRATOR:
In the decades to come,
three Black diplomats
Edward R. Dudley,
Terence Todman, and Carl Rowan
would challenge the foundations
of American diplomacy
and try to change the way
America represented itself
to the world.
CARL ROWAN:
Sure, we're going to be
criticized.
It's because we're talking
about the things
that the United States
stands for,
the things that the
United States seeks to be.
NARRATOR:
They would challenge not only
the State Department,
but U.S. foreign policy itself.
DUDLEY:
Washington got accustomed
to my taking strong
independent stands
because the United States had a
revolution for our independence,
and we should be supportive
of independence.
NARRATOR:
These three diplomats
would also challenge
an unequal system
that had long determined
who should represent
America overseas.
DUDLEY:
If one was an ambassador,
there was a feeling that
this man was a true
representative of a country.
ANDERSON:
For diplomats,
you're fighting America
so that it can live up to what
it says it is,
while you're also fighting
for America.
That is no easy walk.
♪
(applause)
NARRATOR:
On March 12,
1947,
President Harry S. Truman
articulated a policy
that would come to be known
as the Truman Doctrine.
♪
HARRY S. TRUMAN:
At the present moment
in world history,
nearly every nation must choose
between alternative
ways of life.
If we falter in our leadership,
we may endanger
the peace of the world,
and we shall surely endanger
the welfare of this nation.
NARRATOR:
This was the cornerstone
of American foreign policy
in the Cold War
with the Soviet Union,
the idea that undemocratic
regimes anywhere
were a threat to freedom
everywhere.
Truman promised
that the United States
would do everything in its power
to stop the spread of communism
in any nation in the world.
NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
Already an iron curtain had
dropped around Poland, Hungary,
Yugoslavia, Bulgaria
Menace to the security
and institutions
of democratic government.
This truly a war of ideas.
NARRATOR:
The post-war world
was now a chessboard in
a high-stakes match between
democracy and communism.
The United States
and the Soviet Union battled
to win the hearts and minds
of neutral nations
all over the globe.
(man shouting indistinctly)
ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH:
In nations that are becoming
independent, how do they
maneuver in a world in which
the U.S. and the
Soviet Union have demanded
that people choose sides?
At the heart of the Cold War
were struggles over narrative.
♪
The Achilles heel for the
United States is its history
of racialized violence,
oppression,
and injustice against
people of color in the United
States and elsewhere.
MARY DUDZIAK:
How the United States treated
its own citizens mattered
diplomatically
in a way that it hadn't before.
♪
CAROL ANDERSON:
Black veterans were coming back
from the Second World War,
and they were demanding
the democracy that they
had fought so hard for.
There were a series of horrific
lynchings in 1946.
♪
and Truman is just absolutely
horrified.
Truman understood that
if the U.S. wanted the world
to believe them
when they said that they were
offering a democracy
that would benefit all,
then they needed to show
that they could offer that
democracy at home.
NARRATOR:
In 1948, President Truman
made a bold step:
he issued executive orders
to desegregate the military
and the civil service.
With a tough re-election
looming,
he looked to strengthen his ties
to the African American
community.
When the post of Minister
to Liberia became available,
Truman's team asked
Walter White,
the head of the N.A.A.C.P.,
the nation's most influential
civil rights organization,
to recommend a candidate.
White suggested a sharp
N.A.A.C.P. lawyer,
Edward R. Dudley.
At 37, Edward Dudley of
Roanoke, Virginia,
had already had
a storied career.
♪
DUDLEY:
I was 23 years old.
I came to New York, bright,
fresh, full of vinegar.
I applied for a job as
an assistant stage manager
at the Lafayette Theater
in Harlem.
(cheers and applause)
Orson Welles came to work
with us
and directed a Haitian Macbeth.
Lay on, Macduff!
And damn'd be he who first
cries, "Hold, enough!"
(stage fighting, yelling)
DUDLEY:
I saw no real future
in New York theaters.
Stagehands were not permitted
to work below 125th Street.
♪
So I decided to go to
law school.
NARRATOR:
In 1943, Thurgood Marshall,
the head of the N.A.A.C.P.'s
Legal Defense Fund,
hired Dudley to assist
with his strategy
of dismantling inequality
one case at a time.
For five years,
the two men crossed the country,
filing, and winning,
anti-discrimination lawsuits.
But now, President Truman was
asking Edward Dudley
to be the face of America
in Liberia.
♪
DUDLEY:
In Liberia,
the staff at the legation
welcomed us.
Shortly thereafter,
we engaged in the task
of diplomacy.
We get in touch
with the other members
of the diplomatic corps.
There's a parade,
view the troops.
This is big diggins in
small countries.
And all of a sudden,
you're catapulted
into this kind of thing.
And then you do the best
you can.
EDWARD DUDLEY, JR.:
My father was a risk taker.
I was six when I first joined
them
in Liberia.
My mother did most
of the raising.
(children speaking indistinctly)
My father was
the disciplinarian.
He was a very confident man.
♪
NARRATOR:
Like all political appointees,
Dudley served at the
pleasure of the president.
(cheering)
With the 1948 presidential
election
only a few months away
and Truman trailing badly
in the polls,
Dudley believed his time in
Liberia would be short-lived.
DUDLEY:
And we woke up and Harry Truman
was the president.
Rather than stay a few months
in Africa, we stayed five years.
NARRATOR:
Dudley's staff included
a small community of
African American diplomats.
Some had been in Liberia
for years,
and experienced more freedom
there than they could have
in the segregated United States.
(croquet mallet thwacks ball)
♪
They shared a commitment
to institution-building and
felt pride in the knowledge
that they were a part of
a pivotal moment in history
in a rapidly changing Africa.
A vital American ally
in World War II,
Liberia had provided
critical rubber supplies
and the site
for a military base.
But now, American attention
had shifted toward
African countries on the brink
of independence
nations whose loyalties
in the Cold War hung
in the balance.
Dudley faced a delicate task.
BRENDA GAYLE PLUMMER:
President Tubman felt
Liberia was being neglected
and is not getting
the kind of foreign assistance
that it deserved.
So Dudley's representing
the United States
when that traditional
relationship
is beginning to shift.
NARRATOR:
To underscore Liberia's
importance as an ally,
the United States elevated
the status
of the American Legation
to an Embassy a shift
that made Dudley a pioneer
for Black diplomats.
DUDLEY:
I became the first ambassador
of color from the United States.
♪
Ambassador, being the highest
diplomatic rank in Liberia,
this mantle fell upon
my shoulders.
MICHAEL KRENN:
When he was raised
to the ambassadorial level,
he was not simply going
to push papers
and have photo ops,
he wanted to do things
in Liberia.
♪
There was heavy U.S. investment
in the country.
Firestone and other American
companies that were there
considered themselves
almost as invaders
that conquered pieces of land
and used them as they wished.
NARRATOR:
Ambassador Dudley's task
was to balance
American interests
with Liberian progress.
The key was an initiative
called Point Four.
(newsreel music playing)
NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah,
Prime Minister of the Gold
Coast, arrives in Liberia.
A portion of his visit
is spent surveying
Point Four activity in Liberia.
♪
NARRATOR:
Point Four was President
Truman's ambitious
international aid program.
It sent American expertise,
money, and supplies
to developing nations,
demonstrating the
considerable benefits
of being an American ally.
♪
DUDLEY, JR.:
My father dove into this.
We're going to help them
with bridges,
with roads, with health,
education.
My father could see
the results
and to see the change.
♪
ANDERSON:
The significance of
Edward Dudley
being the first
African American ambassador
is huge.
It is part of the struggle
of the recognition of merit.
NARRATOR:
It had taken the United States
160 years.
(bell clanging)
The State Department
was created in 1789.
Its diplomats,
appointed by presidents,
had always been the face
of America in foreign lands.
Yet the State Department
had a very limited vision
of who should represent America
to the world.
KRENN:
During Reconstruction, there
were a few African Americans
appointed as diplomats.
In 1869, Ebenezer Bassett
was the first
African American diplomat.
He was sent as
a minister to Haiti.
Frederick Douglass was appointed
to that same position.
So there were opportunities,
but they were very,
very small opportunities.
PLUMMER:
The State Department had
the well-deserved reputation
of being extremely elitist.
It was the bailiwick
of Boston Brahmins.
Pale, male, and Yale.
♪
NARRATOR:
After World War I,
Congress attempted
to professionalize
the diplomatic corps.
KRENN:
The Rogers Act, 1924,
set up the Foreign Service exam
that had to be taken
by every candidate.
It was supposed to set up
a merit-based system.
NARRATOR:
The legislation seemed to be
a revolution in the making.
In theory, anyone who passed
the rigorous test
could join the Foreign Service.
And in 1925, a law clerk named
Clifton Wharton
easily passed the written exam.
KRENN:
So there was this wide
assumption that he was white.
And then he came for
the oral part of his exam,
and was very hastily
sent off to Liberia.
They didn't even send him
to the Foreign Service school
for training.
♪
NARRATOR:
Only four more African Americans
were accepted
into the diplomatic corps
over the next 25 years.
KRENN:
The chairman of Foreign Service
personnel, Joseph Grew,
stated very clearly that
African Americans, women,
Jewish Americans
would be quietly,
but effectively, excluded.
Even if they passed through
the written exam,
they would be shuffled away
through the oral examination.
MAN:
As Foreign Service Officers,
you are sample Americans,
and many people abroad
will think better or worse,
of the United States because
of what you do.
(applause)
♪
DUDLEY:
I used to come back to
Washington,
in a circle with nothing
but white people,
and I'd be introduced as
ambassador to Liberia.
And none of them would ever
hear that
because they would turn to me
and ask me,
"How do you like our country?"
talking about America.
The fact of the matter was,
they could never conceive that
a Black man could ever be
an ambassador.
♪
NARRATOR:
Dudley's sense of doing good
work in Liberia
was soon tempered by the reality
for African American diplomats.
He realized they were stuck
in an international loop
that was limiting
their professional growth
and their ability to advance.
DUDLEY:
In Liberia, the Black Foreign
Service Officers
had never had the opportunity
of serving anywhere else
in the world,
despite the fact that
it was a State Department policy
to rotate officers
every two years,
none had ever gotten outside
of a little triumvirate
called Monrovia,
Ponta Delgado,
and Madagascar.
And this had been going on
for year
after year, after year.
ANDERSON:
The State Department had
what they called the
Negro Circuit.
They put them in places where
there were already Black people.
And Dudley looked at a system
that had been in place
for decades and said, "No."
♪
DUDLEY:
We put together a memorandum
documenting
every Black
in the Foreign Service
over a long period of years.
♪
When they came into the service,
how long they had been in,
and the fact that they
had never been transferred.
We added a class of white
Foreign Service Officers.
In every instance,
they had had four, five,
and six transfers,
and had been in different posts
throughout the world.
♪
You had these
Foreign Service Officers
well-trained, highly educated
Being placed simply
in the Negro Circuit.
It makes it really hard
to do the work of America when
you know that you have been
Jim Crowed by your
own government.
♪
NARRATOR:
The former lawyer quickly saw
that the Negro Circuit
directly violated the
Foreign Service Act of 1946.
It was a law whose central
purpose
was to make the Foreign Service
stronger and more efficient.
But with Truman pushing
for desegregation,
the Act also stated a goal of
"eliminating conditions
favorable
to inbred prejudice
and caste spirit."
DUDLEY:
My entire background had been
with the National Association
for the Advancement
of Colored People.
And I knew exactly what to do.
I asked for an audience with
the Undersecretary of State,
John Peurifoy, and sat in
his office while he read it.
And he was visibly disturbed,
and asked me what I was going
to do with it.
I indicated that
it was his responsibility
to correct
an unwholesome situation,
but in my judgment,
an illegal situation.
Within six months,
transfers came through
and the number one
Foreign Service Officer
was sent to Paris, France.
And this is the first time that
a Black Foreign Service Officer
had ever served in Europe.
A second Foreign Service Officer
was sent to Zurich, Switzerland.
And a young lady of great talent
was sent to Rome, Italy.
(cheers and applause)
NARRATOR:
In 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower
was elected president.
Eisenhower was a war hero,
not a career politician.
Raised in Kansas,
he came from a world
where segregation
was the law of the land.
LENTZ-SMITH:
His State Department
is hostile, certainly,
to decolonizing nations
and uninterested in any kind
of meaningful
African American
diplomatic service.
♪
NARRATOR:
Eisenhower's election
meant Dudley's time
as ambassador was over.
Before the new administration
took office,
Dudley officially documented
his strong objection
to maintaining the status quo
in his resignation letter.
He argued,
"Black Foreign Service Officers
must have equal opportunity
for assignments worldwide."
The Negro Circuit had to end.
He made a Cold War argument
that I'm not asking you just
as a moral imperative.
You've got to do good
for these three-quarters
of the world's people
who are looking at America
to see whether
it will live up to its promise
of democracy and freedom.
And here's a way to do it.
NARRATOR:
In 1953,
Dudley left
the State Department,
returning to the N.A.A.C.P.
and the wider struggle
for Civil Rights in America.
♪
In the early 1950s,
the United States rode a wave
of prosperity.
But while the country was locked
into a brutal war in Korea,
the nation also agonized
over the Soviet threat
of nuclear devastation,
(siren blaring)
and a growing fear of communism
within America.
(plane engines droning)
NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
Holidays,
vacation time, we must be ready
to do the right thing
if the atomic bomb explodes.
Duck and cover!
(explosion)
NARRATOR:
Senator Joseph McCarthy
of Wisconsin
sensationally claimed
that hundreds of communist spies
had infiltrated
the State Department.
JOSEPH MCCARTHY:
Plans have been discussed
by the Soviet secret police
to obtain blank
American passports
from communists
employed in the
State Department.
NARRATOR:
American government agencies
and showboating Congressmen
falsely linked civil rights
organizations with communism.
For aspiring Black diplomats,
this created yet another barrier
to a career in
the State Department.
Secretary of State
John Foster Dulles
said none of these Negroes
can get through with
"lily white" clearance.
ANDERSON:
Think about what that
is really saying.
It's saying that
Black folks can't be trusted
with American democracy.
So we can't have them in our
mainline bureaucracies
doing the work of America.
♪
NARRATOR:
One ambitious young man refused
to be deterred.
In 1952, a 26-year-old
from the U.S. Virgin Islands
named Terence Todman passed a
written federal service exam,
and was offered a job
at the State Department.
But then he arrived
for his first day of work.
TERENCE TODMAN:
The head of personnel said that
we note your accent isn't
a hundred percent American,
and we can't afford to have
anyone
in the Foreign Service who isn't
immediately identifiable as
American.
JAMES DANDRIDGE:
The accent wasn't
the defining reason.
That was the expressed reason.
The real reason is you
you're Black.
You are not really
fully American.
NARRATOR:
But Todman persisted.
He argued his case up the ladder
to the head of the office.
TODMAN:
Ambassador Whitman said,
there's a great deal
of work to be done
in this office.
We cannot afford to hire
a "showpiece."
I said, "Sir, if your job was
a showpiece, I wouldn't want it.
I think too highly of myself
to take a job like that."
And he said,
"Okay, we'll take you on."
♪
DORIS TODMAN:
Terence was born in St. Thomas,
Virgin Islands.
Race was not an issue.
Just being raised
in the Virgin Islands,
it sort of gave you a sense
of who you are.
♪
He grew up very poor.
We were in the same class.
He's quite bossy, by the way.
He was very, very smart.
I remember my great-grandmother
saying,
"That young man, whoever he is,
is going places."
NARRATOR:
In 1945, at age 19,
Todman had been drafted
into the Army.
He took the officer's candidate
exam in Spanish and English,
and passed both.
Then he was shipped out
to Japan,
where he discovered his calling.
TODMAN:
I learned to speak Japanese,
and I spoke to my fellow
officers
and heard the misconceptions
they had about the Japanese.
And I would tell them
what the Japanese were like.
And speaking to the Japanese,
the misconceptions
they had about Americans
(chuckling):
were so great,
that I found myself
telling the Japanese
about Americans.
And I realized that a lot of
difficulties arose
from people not knowing
about each other.
And that became critical
to my thinking
about what I would do
afterwards.
This was the eye-opening
experience
that propelled his interests
into Foreign Service.
If he could be as successful
as a communicator
in the military,
why not seek an opportunity
to apply those
skills as a diplomat?
♪
NARRATOR:
Terence Todman began
as a Foreign Service
desk officer in Washington D.C.,
monitoring U.S. relations
with three Asian nations.
From the beginning,
his colleagues didn't know
what to make of his presence.
TODMAN:
When they came to speak
to the Nepal desk officer,
they'd walk in,
see me behind a desk,
and wonder,
what are you doing there?
There'd be real amazement,
just to the idea
of an African American
in an officer position.
DORIS TODMAN:
Being a diplomatic wife
was a full-time job.
There was so much work
dealing with three countries,
India, Ceylon, and Nepal.
He'd bring the newspapers
home for me to read.
I would underline
what was important
and give him a briefing.
I was a part of it.
NARRATOR:
Todman's first overseas
assignment was India.
But first, he had
to take language training
in Hindustani at the
Foreign Service Institute.
This was Virginia in 1957,
where segregation was legal.
TODMAN:
My first day, the white officers
went across the street
into a restaurant.
And I was not allowed
to go there because
Black Americans couldn't
go into their restaurants.
So I went to the
State Department and said,
"This can't go."
State Department said,
"These are Virginia laws,
"a lot of people have come here
and haven't said
anything about it."
And I said, "Well,
I'm not other people,
and you're doing
something that's not right."
DANDRIDGE:
And he said to the Department
of State, "You have a problem.
"I don't have a problem.
This is not about me."
♪
NARRATOR:
Todman later said,
"I was considered
a troublemaker,
and that was all right."
KRENN:
Todman knew that
institutional culture
wasn't going
to change on its own.
It was going to change
by being confronted,
by being embarrassed.
And he kept up such
a firestorm of protest
that eventually
the Department of State
rented half of the restaurant.
There finally was a
desegregated cafeteria
for Foreign Service Officers.
NARRATOR:
While Terence Todman
was confronting racism
inside the State Department,
the U.S. government
was confronting
a Soviet information campaign
focused on highlighting
America's racial violence.
A large part of the Cold War
was a battle
of public relations.
Which side would be
better at selling itself?
(horns honking)
To counter Soviet
propaganda worldwide,
Eisenhower created the United
States Information Agency,
the U.S.I.A.
NICHOLAS CULL:
As a one-stop shop for American
foreign policy information,
U.S.I.A. has an astonishing
range of outlets.
It had Voice of America radio.
(speaking non-English languages)
CULL:
It had libraries.
It gets U.S.I.A. material in
front of millions of people
and is a tremendous part of how
the United States
is perceived in the world.
NARRATOR:
The crucial audiences
for the American message
were countries that hadn't
taken sides in the Cold War,
the non-aligned nations.
Terence Todman was sent
to the most important
neutral nation of all India.
BRENDA GAYLE PLUMMER:
India had been one
of the countries
most critical of the
United States' race relations.
It was a country that was
independent of the Soviets.
It was a very
influential country.
Indian opinion was important.
NARRATOR:
As the Todman
family looked to India
for their first
overseas posting,
the eyes of the world
were focused
on Little Rock, Arkansas.
♪
(crowd clamoring)
PLUMMER:
One of the interesting aspects
of the Civil Rights
controversies
of the late '50s was
they were televised.
NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
Little Rock, Arkansas.
The white population are
determined to prevent
colored students from
going to the school
their own children attend.
PLUMMER:
This was one of the first times
in U.S. history
when racial violence
could be seen all
over the world.
ANDERSON:
You've got nine
Black honor students,
just trying to go to school,
just trying to get an education.
We see white mobs, angry mobs,
trying to get at the kids.
(crowd shouting)
MARY DUDZIAK:
The "Times of India"
tracked it day by day.
Race was undermining the ability
of the United States to appeal
to emerging new nations.
And it raised questions
"Why should we be your ally when
you treat people who
look like me this way?"
NARRATOR:
The governor of Arkansas
sent in the National Guard
to block the Black students
and keep the school segregated.
For three weeks, the president
of the United States
did nothing at all.
ANDERSON:
The Soviets were all on top
of the explosion at Little Rock.
You see the frustration
in the administration,
in the State Department,
calling it propaganda.
It is a way for them
to strip it of its truth.
It's not propaganda
if it's true.
Our enemies are gloating
over this incident
and using it everywhere to
misrepresent our whole nation.
Little Rock will return
to its normal habits
of peace and order.
Thus will be restored
the image of America
and of all its parts.
(crowd clamoring)
LENTZ-SMITH:
Eisenhower deploys
federal troops.
He ultimately does it
for these questions
of American credibility
in international coverage,
not because it's
the right thing to do.
NARRATOR:
As America continued to
reveal its faults to the world,
it was a frustrating time
for Terence Todman
to be a Foreign Service
Officer abroad.
"We were putting out
a lot of information,
which no one paid
any attention to,"
he would later say.
"If we assigned a couple
of Black officers
"to positions
in those embassies,
"their very presence,
as Black Americans
in official positions, would
tell the story far better."
And for Doris Todman,
it was difficult to be overseas
watching the Civil Rights
struggle unfold
half a world away.
DORIS TODMAN:
Well, I would say,
"Why am I here?
I should be out there
marching," you know.
And he said, "Look,
we serve a purpose, too.
We're showing what
America could be."
DANDRIDGE:
He was concerned that
we represent the truth
and not painting over of
American culture and society.
He had a job to do,
to represent the
United States of America,
the good, the bad, and the ugly.
And if it was ugly,
he said it's ugly.
(crowd clamoring)
NARRATOR:
By the late 1950s,
people throughout
Asia and Africa
were fighting for
self-determination
against colonial powers.
But Eisenhower failed
to see a connection between
liberation movements in Africa
and civil rights in America.
He saw action against
colonial governments
as communist-inspired.
LENTZ-SMITH:
Deeply embedded in U.S. values
in the 1950s was
an understanding of
white people at the
top of a heap of worth
and capability, and
Black people, Asians, you know,
Indigenous people
controlling their own destinies,
would mean chaos and upheaval,
is deeply rooted in
racialized understandings
of who has the capacity
for self-government.
TODMAN:
While serving
on U.S. delegations,
I noticed the
United States going along
with what the British
and French were doing
in dragging their feet
and not keeping up to
their sacred trust of bringing
these countries
to self-government.
And I kept insisting
that the U.S. policy
should be in keeping
with our own history
and our own principles,
and that we should
not be going along
with what these colonial
powers were doing.
KRENN: Todman represented
the sort of young lions
coming in,
confronting this idea within
the State Department
that the real experts on Africa
are the old colonialists.
♪
NARRATOR:
In 1960, liberation
movements in Asia and Africa
were transforming
global politics.
That year alone,
17 African nations won
their struggle for independence.
Eisenhower left office in 1961,
just as the movement
for civil rights at home was
growing stronger by the year.
In his winning campaign,
John F. Kennedy
had promised to support
both civil rights
and African independence.
KENNEDY:
The great battleground
for the defense and expansion
of freedom today is the whole
southern half of the globe
Asia, Latin America,
Africa, and the Middle East,
the lands of the rising people.
NARRATOR:
But for all his rhetoric,
the new president
mainly focused on one problem
Stopping the expansion
of communist power.
Now he looked for
someone he could trust
to communicate his
policies to the world.
Oh, New Year's Day of 1961,
I was lying in bed
in Pasadena waiting
for the Rose Bowl game to start,
when I got a telephone call
asking if I'd come down
to Washington as Deputy
Assistant Secretary of State.
Wow, that must've
been an exciting call.
Well, it, uh there
were a lot of days
during those
four-and-a-half years
when I wished I'd
never gotten the call.
(audience laughter)
NARRATOR:
By the time he
received that call,
Carl Rowan was already a
nationally known journalist.
During the 1960 campaign,
he'd written
a series of articles for
a Republican-owned newspaper
on Democratic candidate John
F. Kennedy that Kennedy found
surprisingly fair.
Six months later,
the new president offered
the young journalist the job
of Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State
for Public Affairs.
Carl Rowan would communicate
Kennedy's policies
to journalists around the world.
JEFFREY ROWAN:
He wanted his voice to be heard.
He wanted a seat at the table
in both domestic
and international policy making.
♪
NARRATOR:
The appointment made
Rowan the highest-ranking
African American official
in the State Department.
It was a remarkable
accomplishment,
especially for someone
who'd grown up in a family
of five in a small house
with no electricity
in McMinnville, Tennessee.
ROWAN:
His mother was
a cleaner for houses
and his dad really didn't
bring in a consistent income.
That led to squabbles
between his parents.
Those were very
difficult times for him.
NARRATOR:
From the beginning,
Carl Rowan
was driven to succeed.
He was valedictorian
of his high school class,
and went to Tennessee
State University.
Then he became one of the first
African American officers
in the history of the U.S. Navy.
But when he came back
home to Tennessee,
he was still a
second class citizen.
♪
He decided to
become a journalist.
He would tell the ugly truth
about racism in the South.
ROWAN:
In 1948, I got a job with
the "Minneapolis Tribune"
at a time when very few
daily newspapers
were hiring Negroes as writers.
In 1951,
I suggested to the editors
that we had a responsibility
to tell the people
of this state something about
the Negro citizens
of this nation.
NARRATOR:
The 18-part series called
"How Far From Slavery?"
was a sensation,
and made Rowan's career.
KRENN:
Rowan portrayed the racial
problems in a very specific way.
That really all we're talking
about are a few Southern states,
these holdouts, who
don't really agree with
the vast majority of Americans.
ROBESON TAJ FRAZIER:
He had a viewpoint that
working class people,
when given opportunity,
can participate
in ideals
of American citizenship.
♪
NARRATOR:
In 1954, Rowan took his idea
of the American dream
overseas to India,
as part of a lecture series
sponsored by the State
Department.
FRAZIER:
Part of the agenda
is for him to represent
someone who has
been able to uproot themselves
from abject poverty.
He's there to represent
possibilities
of life in the United States.
It perpetuates the kind
of dominant U.S. ethos
of individualism,
which completely negates
the reality that
Rowan was an anomaly.
NARRATOR:
One evening, an Indian
journalist introduced Rowan
as an "excellent
propagandist for America,"
saying, "We are all
interested in how a man
"with a Black skin,
who has been unable to know
freedom, can talk so learnedly
about a free society."
It was an uncomfortable moment,
and it reconstructed
Rowan's view of the world.
KRENN:
Rowan believed that these
attacks were communist inspired.
That's what he was facing
misconceptions, lies,
distorted stories.
NARRATOR:
"I was not a State
Department lackey,"
Rowan would later write.
"I simply went from Darjeeling,
to Patna, to Cuttack,
"to Madras, saying good
things about my country
"because I believed that
the society that had given me
"a break was in
the process of taking
great strides toward
racial justice."
LENTZ-SMITH:
The first word for
him is "patriot."
And that's a
complicated thing for
a Black man to be
in the mid-1950s.
So he is critical of the U.S.,
but he also sees promise,
he believes that
American democracy
would be good for the world,
and for decolonizing nations.
♪
NARRATOR:
Rowan became friendly
with Vice President
Lyndon Johnson on a 1961 trip
through Asia, including Vietnam,
where the U.S.
was already
becoming entangled in a war.
♪
Their friendship
fueled Rowan's ambition,
but it led to frustration,
as well.
"I suppose it's natural that
"anyone who travels with
and advises a vice president
would develop some sense
of self-esteem," he later wrote.
"I took on a sense
of self-importance that
"had nothing to do with reality.
I forgot," he wrote,
"that I was just another Negro."
FRAZIER:
He describes
the State Department
as a virtual plantation.
It's very much a kind
of white male culture.
And this is a space that he
is forced to make sense of.
He does push for more,
you know, people of color,
Black people, to be hired.
ROWAN: The fact that I'd come in
as the first deputy assistant
secretary,
we launched a mighty campaign
to integrate the
Foreign Service to the point
that it looked reasonably like
the population
of the United States.
NARRATOR:
But the pace of change was slow.
After two years,
Rowan was ready
to leave the department.
Instead, Kennedy offered
him an ambassadorship
to Finland, and Rowan took it.
AURELIA BRAZEAL:
The currency of
diplomacy is optimism.
You have to be optimistic
as a diplomat.
And that leads to seeing
issues as opportunities.
♪
REPORTER:
And now you're here and
we hope that you will
like to stay here with us.
I know we're going
to enjoy it immensely.
And we look forward
to seeing all of this
country and as many of
Finland's people as possible.
ROWAN:
The Finns did
magazine articles galore.
I remember one in one of
the big Finnish magazines,
the most colorful ambassador
in Finland.
(laughs)
They were talking
about the unorthodox style
that I brought to the job,
in the sense of traveling
more than any
American had before,
and going out bowling
with the Finnish people.
♪
JEFFREY ROWAN:
People would walk up
to us and stare,
but it wasn't a kind
of racist staring.
They were just curious
because they had never
really seen people
of color before.
♪
NARRATOR:
For Rowan,
being a Black ambassador
in Finland had a subtext.
He wrote,
"I could belie the notion
that my country was
hopelessly racist."
Rowan said,
"My coming to Finland would
"hasten the day when
American Negroes are
playing the role they ought to
play in our Foreign Service."
Finland was a
critical country for
a president preoccupied with
drawing the line
against Communism.
The Soviet Union loomed
large on Finland's border.
Ambassador Rowan was now
on the frontlines
of the Cold War.
KRENN:
Finland was a hotspot.
Finland was seen
as sort of a nation
on the fence in the Cold War.
This was a nation we really
had to curry their favor.
We know the Soviets were also
trying to curry their favor.
(explosion)
NARRATOR:
The U.S. and the
Soviet Union had enough
nuclear weapons to destroy
the other many times over.
Kennedy urged the
world's leaders to sign
a partial test ban,
and Kennedy's
directive to Rowan was clear
persuade Finland's president,
Urho Kekkonen,
to support an
international treaty.
KENNEDY:
Let us call a truce to terror.
The logical place
to begin is a treaty
assuring the end
of nuclear tests
of all kinds,
in every environment.
♪
NARRATOR:
Rowan succeeded in getting
Kekkonen to join the effort.
This was his greatest
accomplishment as an ambassador.
But his stay was cut short
on November 22, 1963.
NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
In winter's darkness,
all men await the new
president's guidance.
His cabinet puts before him a
Congress deadlocked in debate,
the torment of a nation
on the edge of racial clash.
With steadying certainty,
Lyndon Johnson takes over.
NARRATOR:
When Lyndon Johnson
became president,
he entered office with an
ambitious civil rights agenda.
The first step
would be to appoint
African Americans
to high office.
I, Carl T. Rowan,
do solemnly swear
NARRATOR:
He named Rowan the director
of the United States
Information Agency.
That I will support
IRVIN HICKS JR:
The fact that here is
a very accomplished
African American
who has
been put into this position
and has the confidence
of the president
of the United States,
it was a major fanfare
as I was growing up
in African American
publications,
because it was unprecedented.
NARRATOR:
But it wasn't easy to be head
of the U.S.I.A. in the 1960s.
America's racial
unrest intensified,
while the country
spiraled deeper into
what many viewed
as an unjust war.
It was Rowan's job to protect
America's image overseas,
a position that
often put him at odds
with civil rights leaders.
ANDERSON:
Carl Rowan,
I would say, played it
too close to the vest.
There is an insurgency
in the Black community.
And so the kind of quiet,
patient gradualism
isn't playing
to that insurgency.
♪
KRENN:
It was a difficult time to be
a representative of a country
that still kept most of your
fellow African Americans
in second-class citizenship.
Well, which United States
do they represent?
Do they represent
the United States that
they are supposed to represent,
as the paragon of freedom,
democracy, and justice,
or do they represent
the America which is
a segregated, divided,
and sometimes racially
violent society?
(shouting, clamoring)
NARRATOR:
As the debacle
in Vietnam consumed LBJ,
Rowan felt increasingly cut out
of the decision-making process.
His relationship with
the president deteriorated.
In 1965, Rowan resigned.
BRAZEAL:
There were people
I knew who did resign.
As a country,
we lost their talent.
We lost their thinking
on policy issues.
It's hard to quantify
what you've lost,
but you do lose that
voice at the table.
LENTZ-SMITH:
It's easy to
enter an institution
and think you're
going to change it.
But if it's just you
or just a few of you,
how do you keep in mind the
purpose that you entered with
and how do you
fulfill that purpose?
NARRATOR: Both Carl Rowan
and Edward R. Dudley returned
to illustrious
careers outside diplomacy.
(indistinct chatter,
flashbulbs popping)
But Terence Todman dedicated
his life to the Foreign Service.
In 1989, the State
Department honored him
with the rank of
Career Ambassador,
the first African
American diplomat
to receive that distinction.
He served as an
ambassador for 23 years,
learned six languages,
and held six
ambassadorial positions.
HICKS:
That means that
on six occasions,
Ambassador Todman
received Senate confirmation.
On six occasions,
you had the confidence
of the president
of the United States.
That is that is highly unique.
♪
DORIS TODMAN:
We felt we were proving a point
because we had penetrated
an impenetrable area
in America, in diplomacy.
We felt that was important.
KRENN:
If we look at the late
1940s with Edward Dudley,
moving on through
Terence Todman,
moving up to the career
of Carl Rowan and beyond,
the question of progress,
it's a difficult one.
Has there been progress?
There has been progress.
But it's been an uphill battle.
The folks who are
in these bureaucracies,
which are often
very hostile places,
slowly chipping away
at the structures of inequality,
the structures
that suppress merit,
that just see your Blackness
and not your brilliance,
to have those folks
quietly doing that work,
this is that kind of
institutional systemic work
that creates change.
♪
♪
ANNOUNCER:
Next time,
she shot to stardom
MAN:
She never missed.
ANNOUNCER:
and became an American icon.
WOMAN:
There's never been anybody
like Annie Oakley.
WOMAN:
This sweet person,
but with this big-bang gun.
(gun fires)
ANNOUNCER: But at the height of
her popularity,
scandal threatened
to bring her down.
"Annie Oakley," next time
on "American Experience."
Made possible in part
by Liberty Mutual Insurance.
"American Experience:
The American Diplomat"
is available with PBS Passport
and on Amazon Prime Video.
♪
♪