♪ ♪
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.
♪ ♪