Edward R. Dudley

Before Edward R. Dudley became the first Black person to hold the title of U.S. ambassador, he was a teacher, a bellhop, a lawyer, and a civil rights advocate. He knew firsthand the indignity of discrimination that often went unchecked in the first half of the 20th century. So when Pres. Harry Truman made Dudley ambassador to Liberia in 1949, it was not enough for him to serve in the State Department: He was determined to change it.

Early life

Edward Dudley was born in 1911 in South Boston, Virginia, to Edward and Nellie Dudley. His father was a dentist, and his mother, who died when he was seven years old, was a teacher. As a teenager, he held a number of jobs, including working as a bellhop and a waiter, before enrolling in college in North Carolina, where, thinking he would follow in his father’s footsteps, he studied pre-dentistry. After college he became a teacher at a one-room schoolhouse in Virginia, where he also drove the school bus. During that time he learned a stark lesson about discrimination: He made $60 a month; his white counterparts made $115.

He earned a scholarship to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he went to study dentistry. But after a year, he realized it was not for him, and he withdrew and moved to New York, where he had an uncle who was active in Democratic politics. For a while he worked in New York theater, including being a stage manager for a production directed by a young Orson Welles. In 1939 he enrolled in law school, graduating in 1941 and passing the bar.

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A career in law

After a brief stint working at Pepsi-Cola Company, Edward Dudley was recruited by Thurgood Marshall to come work with him at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In the days before the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the NAACP carefully chose the cases it would pursue. One that Dudley tried involved a Black janitor who earned $1,500 a year, while janitors at a school with white students earned twice that amount. It was eerily reminiscent of Dudley’s own experience. In 1945 he became the legal counsel to the governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Diplomatic life

In 1948 President Truman named Dudley as his envoy to Liberia. At the time, the United States had only a diplomatic mission in the African nation, not a full embassy. But when Truman won reelection, he elevated Liberia to embassy status, and Dudley became the United States’ first ambassador to Liberia and, more importantly, the first Black U.S. ambassador anywhere. He was an effective ambassador, spearheading programs run by the U.S. government to help with sanitation, rice propagation, and infrastructure. He also secured training for the Liberian army by U.S. forces in border control best practices.

But his most important work in Liberia was in addressing the ways in which U.S. State Department foreign service officers assigned to African nations were treated differently than those assigned to posts elsewhere in the world. Dudley discovered scores of Black State Department workers were assigned to what Dudley described as “Monrovia, Ponta Delgada, and Madagascar—all Black, hardship, disagreeable posts.” Despite the fact that State Department policy was to rotate people to different posts around the globe every few years, Dudley discovered that Black workers were left in those posts for a decade or more with no chance of movement. As Dudley would recall years later, “It didn’t take a Philadelphia lawyer to tell me that something was wrong.”

Just months into his position, he wrote a meticulously researched memo to the State Department outlining his findings. Within six months, foreign service officers working for Dudley received transfers to London, Paris, Rome, and Zürich.

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Justice Dudley

In 1953, after the election of Pres. Dwight Eisenhower, Dudley resigned his diplomatic post and returned to the United States. He again worked for the NAACP and was elected to the New York City Council, where he made affordable housing a key issue. In 1964 he was elected to the New York State Supreme Court, where he served until he retired in 1985.