The answer lies in the life and work of Terence A Todman – the first African-American diplomat to have attained the rank of career ambassador in the United States (US).

In 1952, when a 26-year old Todman went to join the State Department after clearing his exam, the department rejected him. Over four decades later, in 1995, in an interview as a part of an oral history project of American diplomacy, Todman recalled the personnel department chief telling him, “You are not the kind of person we can use. We need in the US foreign service people who are 100% identifiable as Americans…your accent is not such that you would be readily and immediately identifiable as American.”

But Todman persisted and made it, for the head of the Office of South Asian Affairs – to which he was assigned – agreed to give him a chance.

Todman became the assistant desk officer for India. A few years later, his first overseas posting was to India as a political and labour affairs officer in the American embassy in New Delhi. He learnt Hindi, met political leaders, kept track of parties, visited Parliament, and perhaps most poignantly for him, served as an escort officer for Martin Luther King Jr King and his wife who visited India in February and March of 1959.

Recounting his impressions of India back then, Todman said, “The tie-in with China and close ties with Moscow…The existence of a real democracy, with people free to say and do what they felt. A country that was determined to have its own place in the world, a place it felt justified by its size and industrial development. A country of greater contrasts than I ever could have imagined…a country of such uneven development…a country with the great obsession against Pakistan…a country of an enormously rich culture.”

When asked if India, at that point, was interested in the racial problems occurring in the US and spoke out, Todman said that the responses varied – some Indians, who had come to US, were keen to identify themselves as Indians so that “they won’t be mistaken” for black Americans; others were “very sympathetic”. “As a policy matter, it wasn’t something they pushed a great deal. Again, because you are looking at reality, what difference would it make to India.”

Crossing the bridge

But before he landed in Delhi, Todman had to cross the bridge from Washington DC to Virginia, to attend introductory courses on India in the Foreign Service Institute. It was 1957. Virginia still had segregation era-laws. The institute itself had a small coffee shop. For lunch, all the white officers went across the street to a regular restaurant. When Todman asked where he could eat, the State Department told him there were no arrangements, “regretted” that they were in Virginia which did not allow Whites and Blacks to eat together, and since it was a privately-run restaurant, the Department could do little.

As Todman recalled, “They said people had gone there before I had, and no one else had complained. I said, that’s fine, they took it, but I am not going to and so we need to work something out.”

Eventually, the State Department leased half the restaurant; a partition was put up, the same kitchen and waiters were used, but half catered to the department and half to private customers. “The State Department recognised that it had to make provisions of an equal nature for all its employees…I was considered a troublemaker but that was all right. It was an important change.”

Sixty-five years after that encounter, on Tuesday, the Harry S Truman cafeteria of the State Department in Washington DC was renamed after Terence Todman. At the renaming ceremony, secretary of state Antony J Blinken acknowledged the department’s dark history.

He pointed out that when Todman was born in 1926, the department was “almost entirely white and male”; two years before that, the chair of the Foreign Service Personnel Board had said that even if Black applicants made it in the written exam, they should be rejected in the oral exam; an internal review in 1949 showed that the few Black diplomats who were in the service spent 92% of their time rotating between three hardship postings (Liberia, Madagascar and Azores). This was the department that Todman joined.

Blinken then spoke about the former ambassador’s India years. “His first posting abroad was to India, where he was initially given the assignments that no one else wanted. One was writing a report on wheat production, in preparation for a visit by a congressional delegation from the Midwest. Terence threw himself into that work. He met with small farmers, with agronomists, with the local businessmen – people he could talk to because he had learned Hindi. The report was so impressive that he was asked to brief the congressmen in person. And the US ambassador at the time, the great Ellsworth Bunker, started taking Terence with him whenever he travelled to the field.”

A White-dominated institution

Even though there has been a remarkable change from Todman’s time, the State Department continues to be a White-dominated institution. According to a testimony of an official of the Government Accountability Office in 2020 to the House of Representatives, between 2002 and 2018, the proportion of racial or ethnic minorities in the State Department’s full-time, permanent, career 22,806-strong workforce increased from 28% to 32% – but the proportion of African-Americans fell from 17% to 15%. Its descriptive analysis found rates of promotion for ethnic or racial minorities to be 16% to 42% lower, depending on rank, than for Whites.

The current administration has recognised it as a challenge. President Joe Biden issued an executive order on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in the federal workforce. “This order establishes that it is the policy of my administration to cultivate a workforce that draws from the full diversity of the nation.”

In April, the State Department appointed a former ambassador, Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley as its chief diversity and inclusion officer – she led the effort to rename the department café. And at the renaming ceremony, she announced that advancing diversity would be a metric for performance evaluation, and be formally tied to career advancement, and said, “To honour Ambassador Todman’s legacy and the other good troublemakers who came before me, I am committed to making trouble by taking action to further advance diversity and inclusion.”

Todman died in 2014. But almost a century after he was born in Virgin Islands, through his battles in Washington DC and Virginia due to his racial identity, and diplomatic work in India and other posts over a four-decade long professional career, his legacy as America’s pioneering Black diplomat is now etched in the same department that did not want to take him in.

Complete News Source : Hindustan Times