The Foreign Service Journal, June 2013

the Foreign Service journal | JUNE 2013 37 through January 1924 as President Calvin Coolidge’s envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Liberia. This stint as a diplomat came to inflect Du Bois’s later political and literary endeavors. These figures worked side-by-side with lesser-known State Department-affiliated authors of African descent, who served in places like Angola, Madagascar, France and the Dominican Republic. This corps of black writer-diplomats used their over- seas experience to develop strategies for racial representation at home, a move that pivotally shaped literature in the run-up to the Harlem Renaissance. The Question of Representative Character After the Civil War, black men and women in the United States worried that white Americans tended to dismiss high achievements by African-Americans. In a lecture delivered in 1865, Douglass declared that the white public “has sternly denied the representative character of our distinguished men. They are treated as exceptions, individual cases and the like.” During the late 19th century, as black men received appointments to serve as diplomats abroad, they drew on diplomacy’s notion of “representative character” to certify their capacity to speak on behalf of America’s larger black pop- ulation. Through their distinguished work in diplomacy, black men were transforming themselves from African-American representatives abroad to representative African-Americans at home. This movement is illustrated in the 1883 chromolithograph shown here, “Distinguished Colored Men,” which showcases 11 of the most distinguished African-American men of the day, five of whom at one point worked as American ministers or consuls: Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett (minister to Haiti, 1869– 1877), John Mercer Langston (minister to Haiti, 1877–1885), Henry Highland Garnet (minister to Liberia, 1882–1883), Frederick Douglass (minister to Haiti, 1889–1891) and Richard T. Greener (consul in Vladivostok, 1898–1905). One black diplomat of the era, John Stephens Durham (minister to Haiti, 1891–1893), actually used the phrase “representative character” in an 1894 letter to the New York Times in attempting to certify his ability to speak on behalf of America’s larger black population. The next year, on the death of Frederick Douglass, Durham again drew on the notion of diplomatic representation to reaffirm what he described as Douglass’ “representative character.” Douglass, said Durham, was “the ambassador of the oppressed everywhere.” Further drawing on his experiences representing the United States in Haiti, Durham published a 1902 novel, Diane: Priest- ess of Haiti , which pushes the notion of representative charac- ter into the literary realm. The preoccupation with who could speak on behalf of the United States’ larger black population became a major concern during the Harlem Renaissance, as writers attempted to position themselves as “artistic ambas- sadors” (to borrow a phrase from the famous black author Richard Wright). This chromolithograph made in 1883 contains the portraits of 11 prominent African-Americans, five of whom were diplomats. At the center, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895); top right, Blanche Kelso Bruce (1841-1898); top left, Robert Brown Elliott (1842-1884); and clockwise from top of the oval, WilliamWells Brown (1814-1888), Prof. Richard T. Greener (1844-1922), Rt. Rev. Richard Allen (1760-1831), Joseph H. Rainey (1832-1887), Ebenezer D. Bassett (1833-1908), John Mercer Langston (1829- 1897), P.B.S. Pinchback (1837-1921) and Henry Highland Garnet (1815-1882). A. Muller & Co., c1883/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division