The Foreign Service Journal, June 2013

40 JUNE 2013 | the foreign Service journal 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.” of people true! / Here is a hearty handshake, / And homage due to you.” She also wrote a poem titled “To Belgium,” which celebrated the role of colonial soldiers from Africa, Asia and India in the Allies’ fight on behalf of Belgium in the face of its World War I invasion by Germany. A few years later, during the Harlem Renaissance, Gibbs Hunt’s hip-to-matic work for the Pan-African Congress seems to have found fictionalization in Du Bois’s 1928 novel, Dark Princess , which tells the story of an African-American charac- ter named Matthew Towns and his work with a woman named Kautilya (a princess from India) to promote an international council of people of color. For decades, the political and liter- ary work of Ida Gibbs Hunt, who hailed from an early black Foreign Service family, has remained a forgotten influence on this major Harlem Renaissance novel, which Du Bois once called his favorite book. The Past Lives On In the preface to his 2004 memoir, Dreams from My Father , then-State Senator Barack Obama cites William Faulkner’s observation that “the past is never dead and buried—it isn’t even past.” In a 21st-century world that has seen America’s first two African-American Secretaries of State and the elec- tion and re-election of its first black president, remembering the work of early black Foreign Service authors (which also requires remembering virulent racism in America gener- ally and the State Department in particular) can be painful enough that some might wish that the past could be dead and buried. Yet doing so would also require burying the extraordinary resilience and truly admirable achievements of a vibrant group of writer-diplomats who helped shape one of the most important literary movements of the 20th century. n