International Affairs

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 Black Women in America, Second Edition

International Affairs

As national security adviser and secretary of state to George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice has moved beyond the U.S. borders and undeniably affected world politics. Rice, however, is not the first black woman to concentrate her efforts on international affairs. It has been only recently that black women have begun to gain a foothold in the main avenue for international policy-making inside the U.S. government, the State Department. However, since the nineteenth century, indeed since before the Civil War, African American women have been crossing geographic and cultural boundaries.

Early Internationalism

Much of the involvement by black women in international affairs has been directed toward focusing the eyes of the world, or at least of Europe, on the plight of African Americans in the United States, as in the case of black women such as Ellen Craft and Sarah Parker Remond in the era before the Civil War. Nancy Gardner Prince was an early exception. She traveled to Russia with her husband in 1824 and, during her nine and a half years there, distributed Bibles and helped found an orphanage. She traveled to Jamaica twice, in 1840 and 1842, in an unsuccessful attempt to found a school for girls. In this way she was a precursor of the African American woman missionary.

After the Civil War, black women as well as men were primarily active internationally in missionary work. Their work centered in Africa, as did that of many of their successors. These women founded schools and hospitals as well as churches. Among them was Dr. Georgia Washington Patton, one of the first two black women to graduate from Meharry Medical College. She worked as a medical missionary for two years in Liberia. In the late 1890s, Dr. Alice Woodby-McKane and her husband, Dr. Cornelius McKane, spent two years in Liberia and founded the first hospital in that country. Fanny Jackson Coppin traveled to South Africa with her husband in 1902. Her influence on the missionaries there can be seen in the building of the Fanny Jackson Coppin Girls Hall at Wilberforce Institute in Cape Town. Amanda Berry Smith traveled for years in Europe, India, and West Africa. She spent eight years just in Liberia, where she advocated for education for women and children while leading revivals and promoting temperance.

Both the temperance and suffrage movements led even more black women, particularly club women, into the international arena. Like the abolitionist speakers, much of their work was focused on bringing international attention to bear on the hypocrisies in American policy toward African Americans. And, as in many national and international organizations before and since, black women had to fight to belong and fight to be heard.

International Organizations before World War II

The first international women's organization, the International Council of Women (ICW), was formed in 1888 at the annual meeting of the National Women's Suffrage Association (NWSA). Frances Ellen Watkins Harper gave an address on temperance at that first meeting. In 1893 she spoke at the ICW's Congress of Representative Women at the World's Columbian Exposition. Anna Julia Cooper addressed the same meeting with a speech entitled “The Needs and Status of the Black Woman.” Other black women speakers there included Fannie Barrier Williams, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Jackson Coppin, Sarah Jane Early, and Hallie Quinn Brown. Brown, a prominent activist who spoke at the 1895 Third Biennial Convention of the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union, was the first African American to address an ICW meeting overseas in London in 1899. Margaret Murray Washington attended the same meeting, and it is believed that this spurred her to become involved in international affairs.

Never predominantly a suffrage organization, by 1899 the ICW was concentrating on such issues as equal pay, access to the professions, nursing, women's rights in the workplace, and inclusion in trade unions, among many others. All of these were issues of great importance to African American women, and the ICW proved to be the place where the top African American women's club, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), focused its most prolonged and avid attention. However, despite their involvement in the organization since its founding, it was not until 1920 that Mary Morris Burnett Talbert became the first official NACW delegate to be seated at an ICW conference. In 1929 Sallie Stewart became a vice president of the U.S. National Council of Women, and therefore a member of the ICW. Not surprisingly, Mary McLeod Bethune was at the forefront of the activism to end racism within the ICW. For example, through her efforts and those of Hallie Quinn Brown, by 1925 the council began to allow desegregated seating in their meetings.

In 1902 some members of the ICW formed the International Women Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), later renamed the International Alliance of Women. At its first meeting in 1904 in Berlin, Mary Church Terrell, who was the only dark-skinned woman in attendance, gave a speech in fluent German.

Another important international women's organization was the Women's Peace Party, formed in 1915, which became the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in 1919. Among the many prominent black club women who became involved in the league were Terrell, Talbert, Charlotte Atwood, Dr. Mary Waring, Lucy Diggs Slowe, and Dr. Flemmie Kittrell.

Joyce Blackwell-Johnson has written an excellent examination of black women's involvement in WILPF. In it she delineates two major motivations to join the organization. The first, she writes, was ideological. The second was pragmatic. She quotes Terrell as an example of the ideological member: “In no way can the colored people of this country serve themselves in particular, and humanity on general principles, better than by allying themselves with an organization which is trying to end war and remove friction between the races at one and the same time.” One of the resolutions she submitted to the WILPF leadership demanded, in part, “justice and fair play to all the dark races of the world.”

Of the pragmatists, Blackwell-Johnson writes,

"Women in this group believed that blacks, men in particular, should be fighting to improve the conditions of African Americans inside the United States. Furthermore, they reasoned that money spent on fighting wars could instead be used to help the underprivileged at home."

(Blackwell-Johnson, p. 469)

Apart from suffrage and temperance, at the turn of the twentieth century international gatherings were organized around the issue of race. For example, both Dr. Susan McKinney Steward and Sarah S. T. Garnet were delegates to the 1911 Universal Races Congress, which met in London to organize the fight against the then predominant “science” of racial inferiority. Steward delivered a paper entitled “Colored American Women.” In particular, the growing Pan-African movement provided an avenue for black women to express and explore their universality.

Anna Julia Cooper and Anna Jones were members of the executive committee for the 1900 Pan-African Congress. Both also spoke. Cooper's speech was entitled “The Negro Problem in America” and Jones's was “The Preservation of Race Individuality.” Cooper helped draft a message to Queen Victoria that delineated “acts of injustice directed against her Majesty's subjects in South Africa.” Charlotta Spears Bass attended the 1919 Pan-African Congress.

One of the most active of the black women internationalists, Addie Waits Hunton, also attended the 1919 Congress and in 1921 was, with Ida Gibbs Hunt, a member of the twelve-person International Committee that worked to organize that year's Pan-African Congress. As part of an unofficial delegation, she observed and wrote about the American occupation in Haiti in 1926. In 1927, through the women's group she founded, the Circle for Peace and Foreign Relations (CPFR), Hunton and other members raised the money for the 1927 Pan-African Congress. In fact, W. E. B. Du Bois acknowledged that without this group there would have been no 1927 congress at all. That congress hosted 208 delegates and had an audience of 5,000. Hunton spoke at the opening session. Other members of the CPFR included Jessie Redmon Fauset and Nina Du Bois.

As Blackwell-Johnson noted with regard to the WILPF, black women had a variety of intentions in international organizations. They were there to prove in an international arena that African American women had the knowledge and ability to belong. While they agitated to change the racism within the women's organizations, they brought women's issues to the Pan-African movement. They used all these organizations to bring international attention to the condition of black women in America. In white organizations in particular, they used their physical presence as a challenge and their unique world view as a catalyst to bring such issues as colonialism and casteism to the attention of these largely Western groups.

Yet even while they recognized the importance of their involvement in the international congresses and councils, black club women in the 1920s realized that no group existed that truly represented them and addressed international policy as it affected black women. As a result several top-level members of the NACW, including Talbert, founded the International Council of Women of the Darker Races (ICWDR) in 1922. Margaret Murray Washington was elected its first president. Later presidents of the ICWDR included Addie Waits Hunton and Addie Dickerson. Washington wrote of the organization's purpose in 1924,

"Our object is the dissemination of knowledge of peoples of color the world over, in order that there may be a larger appreciation of their history and accomplishments and so that they themselves may have a greater degree of race pride for their own achievements and touch a greater pride in themselves."

(Hoytt, pp. 611–612)

The women who ran the ICDWR applied their knowledge from the black women's club movement to the international arena, recognizing that the African American woman's struggles for access to equal and adequate pay, healthcare, and most particularly education were mirrored by women of color around the globe. One of their projects (in cooperation with the Chicago Women's Club) supported the work of Adelaide Casely-Hayford to found a school in Sierra Leone. Their other efforts included the promotion of African American history and literature in public schools, along with studies of Haiti and Cuba. Unfortunately, the ICWDR never achieved its goal of becoming a truly internationally representative organization, and it ceased operations after World War II. However, as Beverly Guy-Sheftall wrote in “Remembering Sojourner Truth: On Black Feminism,” “This forward looking organization is reminiscent of recent attempts by contemporary Black feminists to establish linkages with other women of color throughout the world and to struggle for the elimination of sexism on a global level.”

Of course, the women of the nationalist movements and the far left were involved internationally by the very nature of the philosophies they espoused. Audley Moore, Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, Amy Garvey, and Lucy Parsons all worked and spoke on international issues, as did, more famously, Shirley Graham Du Bois and Eslanda Robeson. While there is not the space here to discuss in detail the international versus local efforts of these women, it should be noted that they frequently participated in the same organizations as their more moderate sisters. At the 1944 Conference on Africa hosted by the Council on African Affairs (founded in 1937), both Garvey and Bethune were in attendance. In addition, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Robeson, and Bass were all members.

The left gained its largest following during the Depression, and many black women joined various political organizations. Also during the Depression, anticolonial movements were building around the world, from India to Africa. In her book Race Against Empire, Penny Von Eschen points to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 as the time when a broad spectrum of African Americans became aware of and involved in U.S. foreign policy.

Certainly by the end of World War II and the start of the cold war, the role of African Americans in world affairs changed enormously. The cold war and McCarthyism destroyed much of the power of the American left, but it was also an era when a number of new international organizations were formed and anticolonial movements around the world succeeded in gaining their freedom.

United Nations

One of the most important international organizations to be created after World War II was the United Nations. Black women leaders knew from its inception that their presence at the UN was essential to bring to the world's attention the reality of being a black woman in America. In addition, participation in the activities of the UN was a powerful symbol of black women's place at the table of world affairs.

Again at the forefront of the battle was Bethune. Even before the war, Bethune had introduced a more international agenda to the NACW. In 1935, when Bethune called together the top club women of the era to form the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), most if not all of them had been involved in the ICW and in international affairs, including Brown, Terrell, Dickerson, and Daisy Lampkin. At the 1945 UN Conference on International Organization, which drafted the UN charter, Bethune failed in her attempt to have the NCNW made an official consultant to the U.S. delegation. Not to be stopped, Bethune made sure that her organization was involved, even if unofficially, and asked Eunice Hunton Carter (daughter of Hunton) to be the NCNW observer. Carter went on to become a consultant to the Economic and Social Council of the UN for the ICW in 1947 and chaired its committee of laws. In 1955, at the UN conference in Geneva, she was elected chair of the International Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations.

The UN also provided the first opportunity for an African American woman to officially represent the United States government in an international context when, in 1950, Edith Spurlock was appointed by President Harry Truman to represent the United States at the UN. She spent the next sixteen years working in the international arena with the UN and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Like her predecessors, Dorothy Height, fourth president of NCNW, made her presence known at the UN. She was a delegate to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conference on “Woman and Her Rights” held in Jamaica, and, in 1975, she conducted a seminar and participated in the International Women's Year conference in Mexico City. The same year, Height established the NCNW international division to promote relationships with other women's organizations, especially in African countries. By the mid-1980s the NCNW had three international offices: in Dakar, Senegal; in Cairo, Egypt; and in Harare, Zimbabwe. The organization has also developed a collaboration with the Federation of Senegalese Women and the National Union of Togolese Women.

Anna Arnold Hedgeman spent her life working on international affairs through a variety of organizations, including the UN. She worked with the New York City government, hosting visitors to the UN, and served as Mayor Wagner's representative at the tenth-anniversary meeting of the UN in San Francisco in 1955. The following year she participated in a study tour of Israel and the Middle East through the American Christian Committee on Palestine. She was the keynote speaker at the First Conference of African Women and Women of African Descent held in Accra, Ghana, in 1960 and chaired a panel at the International Conference of Social Work as a representative of the United Seamen's Service. She also worked for a few months with the U.S. State Department. However, she was an exception there.

State Department

Despite all their work and all their advancements, the State Department had still not opened its door to black women by the 1960s. However, black women had become increasingly involved in international organizations and movements outside the government. Like many before them, such women as Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, and Maida Springer—whose international trade-union work spanned four decades—spoke up about the hypocrisy of a government that fought to extend democracy overseas and denied it at home. In growing numbers they began to ever more vocally challenge American foreign policy in the third world, to link it directly to racist domestic policies, and to ally themselves with women from around the globe. Unfortunately, there is no space here to go into detail about the international aspects of the civil rights, black power, and global women of color movements. The problems and successes within the official foreign policy arm of the U.S. government itself is too large a story.

While other U.S. government agencies do post employees overseas, the State Department is the official U.S. government agency responsible for representing the United States abroad, as well as for developing and pursuing foreign policy. Part of the State Department is the Foreign Service, which is the main interface with foreign governments and people. Foreign Service officers are meant to reflect U.S. policy, whether or not they agree with that policy. At the same time, these employees are the best source for information about what people are thinking and doing outside of our borders. However, from the point of view of other Washington agencies, as well as the Congress, the department and its employees have often been viewed with suspicion if not disdain. Concerns that members of the Foreign Service have “gone native” or do not represent U.S. interests have dogged the department throughout its history. This is ironic because the State Department, and more particularly the Foreign Service, has proved to be the part of the U.S. government most resistant to change.

According to Michael Krenn in his book Black Diplomacy, at the beginning of the cold war “Department of State officials slowly came to the conclusion that race would play an important role in the postwar world…that America's domestic racial problem was now a foreign policy problem.” However, this realization did not translate into action within the ranks of the department. In 1950, there were only thirty-three blacks in the Foreign Service. Of these, at least twenty-one were posted to Liberia. For the next four decades, the numbers would improve but the problems would still exist.

As late as 1996, the State Department was cited as among the worst government agencies when it came to minority inclusion and promotion. An article that year in The Nation by Bruce Shapiro reported that in 1994 W. Lewis Anselem, political counselor in the embassy to Bolivia, sent a telex that called “dark-skinned State Department workers ‘unscrupulous race and ethnic jumpers’ trying to ‘con’ their way to the top.” While Anselem's language might be extreme even within the ranks of the Foreign Service, its message was not. The State Department and Foreign Service have long had a reputation as “old boy's clubs” of white male Ivy Leaguers who were resistant in the extreme to incursions by outsiders. In fact, a 1989 General Accounting Office study reported that 40 percent of all senior Foreign Service personnel were from Ivy League schools.

That same year, the House Subcommittee on the Civil Service reported that Foreign Service officers who were minorities were denied tenure far more than whites. Even when they were allowed into the Foreign Service, minorities were often given “hardship posts” (that is, Africa and small, “unimportant” countries) and not the “plum” assignments, (that is, Europe and strategically important countries). While many African American Foreign Service officers were and are Africa and Caribbean experts and many Foreign Service officers of all races and both genders are committed to working at so-called “hardship posts” and might even prefer them to the “plum” assignments, there was an undeniable tendency at the State Department to ghettoize its minority employees, whatever their specializations.

In 1986 thirty members of the Foreign Service signed a class action suit on behalf of 359 current and former black Foreign Service officers. The charges included discrimination with regard to employment, assignment, and promotion. These last two charges are particularly important in understanding a Foreign Service officer's ability to advance her career. The Foreign Service is divided into four categories: consular, administrative, political, and economic. The higher-level positions are most frequently given to members of the latter two categories. One of the most important points of the lawsuit was that even when the Foreign Service hired minorities, they were most often given positions in the consular and administrative categories, whether or not that fit with their areas of expertise.

The case was finally settled in 1996. The settlement stated that the State Department would not have to acknowledge its fault in the matter but would have outside supervision of its promotions practices and would pay compensation to some employees. However, while 34 members of the 359 named in the suit wrote to the court supporting the settlement, 55 wrote in opposition to it. As of 2001, three plaintiffs remained, including Mary Cynthia Smoot, and the case was still being appealed in the U.S. District Courts.

There is some reason to be hopeful nonetheless. For example, the number of black women who have achieved the rank of ambassador is steadily increasing. Patricia Roberts Harris became ambassador to Luxembourg in 1965, the first African American woman to be so named. Carol Moseley Braun served as ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. Other African American women ambassadors include Mabel Murphy Smythe-Haith, ambassador to Cameroon (1977–1980) and the Republic of Equatorial Guinea (1979–1980); Barbara Mae Watson, ambassador to Malaysia (1980–1981); Cynthia Shepard Perry, ambassador to Sierra Leone (1986–1989) and Burundi (1990–1993); and Mosina H. Jordan, ambassador to the Central African Republic (1995–1997).

Among the black women serving as U.S. ambassadors at the beginning of the twenty-first century were Mattie R. Sharpless, the Central African Republic; Robin Renee Sanders, the Republic of the Congo; Dennise Mathieu, Niger; and Wanda L. Nesbitt, Madagascar. Arlene Render is a three-time ambassador: She served in Gambia (1990–1993) and the Republic of Zambia (1996–1999) and then as the ambassador to the Ivory Coast (Côte d'Ivoire) beginning in 2001. Aurelia E. Brazeal has also served as ambassador to three countries: Micronesia, Kenya, and Ethiopia. She is also the first African American woman career Foreign Service officer to be promoted into the senior Foreign Service.

In addition to Brazeal, many of these women are career Foreign Service officers, including Render, Brazeal, Sanders, Nesbitt, and Jordan. Harriet Elam-Thomas is a career minister in the senior Foreign Service and, in 1999, became acting deputy director of the United States Information Agency (USIA). Later that year she was named ambassador to Senegal, a position she held until 2002. Before her appointment to that post, from 1995 to 1997, she was the counselor for public affairs at the American embassy in Brussels.

While it is telling that most of these women have been named ambassador almost exclusively in African countries, one can only hope that in so doing they may be bringing foreign policy with regard to Africa to the forefront of America's international agenda. In addition, their other assignments have included some European posts and increasingly high-level positions in the United States.

A case in point is Ambassador Ruth A. Davis, who served as ambassador to Benin in 1992. She is the first black woman to direct the Foreign Service Institute, and during her tenure there she established the Leadership and Management Institute. More importantly, she is the first black woman to be named a career ambassador. In the Foreign Service, this ranking is equivalent to four-star general. In 2001, Davis was named director general of the Foreign Service and director of human resources. In that position, she almost doubled the staff and instituted the largest minority recruitment drive in the history of the department. She left her position in June 2003 to become an adviser for international affairs. Reportedly, she will hold the position only for a year and will then return to the State Department. If her recruitment drive bears fruit, there may come a time when a black woman will lead U.S. foreign policy in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, as well as in Africa.

In addition to the ambassadors and career Foreign Service officers, African American women are making their mark in other areas of the State Department, particularly in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Vivian L. Derryck was sworn in as assistant administrator for Africa of USAID in 1998. After she resigned in 2001, she became the senior vice president and director of public-private partnerships with the Academy for Educational Development. The most highly placed black woman in the department at the beginning of the twenty-first century was Constance Berry Newman, who replaced Derryck as assistant administrator for Africa with USAID before becoming assistant secretary of state for African affairs in 2004.

Susan E. Rice, who has worked both inside and outside the State Department, is one of the brightest stars in foreign policy. The youngest African American woman ever to rise to the level of assistant secretary, at thirty-three she held Newman's former position, assistant secretary of state for African affairs (1997–2001). A Rhodes scholar who studied international relations at Oxford University, she (like Condoleezza Rice—no relation) first lent her international affairs knowledge to the National Security Council (NSC). In 1993 she was named director for international organizations and peacekeeping with the NSC. In 1995 she was named special assistant to the president and senior director for African affairs. She went on to become a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Despite these recent improvements, there is more to be done. As the former Foreign Service officer Ulric Haynes told Bruce Shapiro, “the marginalization of African Americans in the Foreign Service is part and parcel of this country's problems in dealing with dark-skinned people around the world.” In addition, the story of how black women have historically fought and surmounted this marginalization is only beginning to be studied in depth. The subject deserves a lengthy and complete treatment, for it is both important and revealing.

See also Left, The.

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