The Foreign Service Journal, June 2013

36 JUNE 2013 | the foreign Service journal FEATURE Brian Russell Roberts is a professor of American literature at Brigham Young University, with a focus on African-American literature. The University of Virginia Press just published his book, Artistic Ambas- sadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era , which examines the intersecting literary and diplomatic work of African-American writers who traveled as U.S. diplomats during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. T he decades of the 1920s and 1930s are famous for an unprecedented flowering of African-American writing, with many black authors fighting against racial discrimina- tion by publishing novels, poems, plays and essays that argued for their entitlement to full civil rights. Among them, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston have emerged as the most enduringly famous. Hughes’s 1921 poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” is widely read in American high schools and uni- versities to this day, and Hurston’s 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was adapted as a made-for-TV movie by Oprah Winfrey in 2005. Less well known is the fact that the Harlem Renaissance— the literary movement those authors have come to represent— was built upon the late 19th- and early 20th-century work of a vibrant group of African-American writers who represented the United States overseas as diplomatic and consular officers. Beginning during the Reconstruction era, U.S. presidents courted and rewarded their black voting constituencies by appointing African-Americans to diplomatic and consular posts, primarily in nations and colonies of color. Their ranks included Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist and social reformer, who served as U.S. minister to Haiti from 1889 to 1891, and was the first African-American to detail his diplomatic work in an autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1893). James Weldon Johnson, whose “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is still widely sung as “The African-American National Anthem,” worked as a consular officer in Venezuela and Nica- ragua from 1906 to 1913. During these years, Johnson wrote most of his first book of poetry and completed a novel. W.E.B. Du Bois also briefly represented the United States abroad. Co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a longtime editor of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis , Du Bois spent December 1923 FS HERITAGE Ambassadors of Race andNation Here is the little-known story of a group of African-American diplomat-writers whose late 19th- and early 20th-century work shaped the Harlem Renaissance. By Br i an Russe l l Roberts