The Foreign Service Journal, June 2013

the Foreign Service journal | JUNE 2013 39 tion of the blackface minstrel show—a type of variety show in which white actors put on black makeup and performed as subhuman buffoons while purportedly acting like African- Americans. Ellis was most likely unaware of Bacon’s comment to the Bureau of Appointments, but he was certainly aware that such stereotypes pervaded white American culture of the day. In Liberia, he devoted his spare time to studying the culture of the Vai-speaking people of West Africa. After hir- ing Vai scholars to instruct him, Ellis published a 1914 book titled Negro Culture in West Africa , which he wrote, as stated in the preface, out of a conviction that “the Negro should explain his own culture and interpret his own thought and soul life, if the complete truth is to be given to the other races of the earth.” Reviewing Negro Culture in The Crisis , Du Bois could see that Ellis’s book pushed against misrepresentative stereo- types like those embraced by Bacon; Du Bois asserted that the book “ought to be in every colored American’s library.” Of course, Ellis’s book did not lay to rest the question of accurate representation for people of African descent. To continue the fight, Ellis published a 1917 novel set in West Africa titled The Leopard’s Claw. Similar literary efforts were made by Henry Francis Down- ing, who, like Ellis, had been sent by the State Department to West Africa. After serving as a consul in Luanda, Angola, in 1887 and 1888, Downing eventually wrote several plays, as well as a 1917 novel, The American Cavalryman: A Liberian Romance. Today neither Ellis nor Downing is well-known, but their literary works once shared space with those of famous figures such as Du Bois and Johnson in The Crisis’s monthly “Selected List of Books.” It is important to recognize these Foreign Service authors’ contributions to discussions about accurately representing people of African descent in the run- up to the Harlem Renaissance. From Diplomacy to Hip-to-macy Langston Hughes once wrote a short story featuring a black Harlem resident who dislikes the term “diplomat” and fashions himself as a “hip-to-mat.” The hip-to-mat imagines addressing an international group of diplomats: “Gentlemens of the Summit, I want you-all to think of how you can pro- vide everybody in the world with bread and meat. Civil rights comes next. Let everybody have civil rights, white, black, yel- low, brown, gray, grizzle or green.” In coining the term hip-to-mat, Hughes spliced the word diplomat into the phrase “hip to that,” thereby integrating the hip “knowingness” of black vernacular culture into diplo- macy’s traditionally regimented approach to internationalism. Because several black Foreign Service authors at the turn of the 20th century integrated the culture of international diplo- macy into their approaches to racial diplomacy, they, too, might be thought of as hip-to-mats. A particularly intriguing example is Ida Gibbs Hunt, daugh- ter of Mifflin Wistar Gibbs (consul in Madagascar, 1898–1901) and wife of William Henry Hunt, who served at posts in Madagascar (1898–1907), France (1907–1927), Guadaloupe (1927–1929), the Azores (1929–1931) and Liberia (1931–1932). Significantly, Ida Gibbs Hunt was living with her husband at his consular post in Saint-Étienne, France, when Du Bois arrived in Paris to organize the 1919 Pan-African Congress, which was supposed to give a voice to people of African descent in the context of the power realignments taking place after the First World War. Although the State Department had denied passports to many African-Americans who wanted to attend the Pan-Afri- can Congress, it was Gibbs Hunt, the wife of an American con- sul, who collaborated with Du Bois to organize and publicize the meeting, with Du Bois as the Congress’s founding secretary and Gibbs Hunt as the assistant secretary. Even as Gibbs Hunt served as co-organizer of a group seeking to insert itself into negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference and the League of Nations, she wrote two poems that borrowed from the mode of international diplomatic address that she was acquainted with through her ties to diplomacy. In an implicit critique of the United States’ dismal record on race relations, Gibbs Hunt began her poem “To France” with the following lines: “O land of right and justice! / O land Early 20th-century State Department culture harbored biases against black nations and colonies, as well as against the black representatives it sent to these locales.