The Foreign Service Journal, October 2021

58 OCTOBER 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Only one other time have I experienced such an aura when I was around someone, and that was when we got to meet the Dalai Lama in India. Johnny was just that powerful a force.” b Johnny Young’s autobiography is titled From the Projects to the Palace: A Diplomat’s Unlikely Journey from the Bottom to the Top. His journey was most unlikely, indeed. If Vegas odds- makers were to have looked at Johnny when he was growing up in an impoverished Black family in Georgia in the 1940s, they would have given him a zero percent chance of becoming a Career Ambassador. “We had nothing,” Johnny says in the book. “We were as poor as one can be. … We had difficulty with the Ku Klux Klan, and they would come to our street and abso- lutely terrorize us. I remember my mother would hold us close to her and with her hand over our mouths so that we wouldn’t make a sound.” (The mother referred to in this quote was his aunt, who raised him after his bio- logical mother died of heart problems when he was but 1.) And in 1940 the United States was still more than two decades away from having its first African American ambassador. It wouldn’t have just been gamblers who dismissed his chances for success. Johnny moved to the housing projects of Philadelphia at age 11. His attempt to enroll at the nearby, all-white Catholic school was rejected. “No, we don’t want them here,” the priest said, awaken- ing Johnny for the first time to the savagery of racism. Despite eventual academic success, and ambitions of attending college, when he asked his high school coun- selor what he should do after graduation, he was told to “take a job in carpentry or something”—because “no college in its right mind will take a look at you.” Johnny struggled to find meaningful employment: “I began to realize that I’d be called in for jobs, and the minute I walked in the door I knew that it was because of my color that I wasn’t going to get the job.” He eventually earned a certificate in accounting from Temple University and, later, a bachelor of arts magna cum laude; and he worked as a junior accountant for the city of Philadelphia. But it was a trip to Beirut as a delegate for the YMCA in 1965 that would change his life, exposing him to different cultures and convincing him to pursue a career in international affairs. b Johnny discovered the Foreign Service and passed the exam in 1967. Still, the odds were stacked against him. “You have to keep in mind that when I came in in ’67, you could count on one hand—not even two—the number of Black officers in the Ser- vice,” Johnny would recount. Characteristically, Johnny’s diplomatic career started humbly. Johnny and his lifelong love, Angie, were newlyweds when they boarded a steamer for a two-week voyage to their first post, Madagascar. During that first tour, when a diplomatic pouch he was the non-pro courier for temporarily went missing, Johnny thought: “Oh my God, this is the end of my career. It hasn’t even gotten off the ground yet.” Colleagues helped recover the pouch, and stuck out their necks to make sure he wasn’t made a scape- goat. It was an incident that would shape him, and he endeavored to return the favor throughout his career. Johnny Young in 2014, 10 years after he retired from the Foreign Service. TEMPLEUNIVERSITY