Journey into Diplomacy: A Black Man's Shocking Discovery : A Memoir

By Leaford C. Williams

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1570872864
• ISBN13: 9781570872860
• Release Date: October 1996
• Publisher: Professional Pr
• Length: 492 Pages
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A memoir, an American success story, an appeal for fairness.

This autobiography by Leaford Williams is more than a Journey into Diplomacy. It is a remarkable American success story -- that takes the reader into several worlds. The first is rural Jamaica before the second World War, where Williams was born and raised in the town of Mulgrave. The second is the world of the Jamaicans recruited and shipped to work on American farms during the Second World War. Williams spent many months in the cranberry bogs of Wisconsin, helping make the cranberry sauce that gave GIs a memory of home when they ate Thanksgiving dinners on mess tins around the world. He reports that his hard work earned him respect and friendship in Wisconsin. Then he was transferred to grow sugar in Florida, and his account of racism in the South will shame the modern reader. At the end of the war, Williams returned to Jamaica and then used his savings to begin studying in England. An invitation from a relative allowed him to return to the U.S., this time as an immigrant. He joined the Air Force and soon found himself on Okinawa in a segregated aviation engineering unit. He was there when President Truman's order to integrate the armed forces was implemented, moving for the first time into barracks with white airmen. This is a third fascinating world described for the reader, tracing the slow and stumbling process by which black and white airmen came to work together and know each other. Athletics was a key to better relations, he reports. In an important step for his future, Williams studied Korean and joined the U.S. team helping repatriate prisoners of war at Panmunjom before finishing his service in the Air Force. Finally, after using his veteran's benefits at Georgetown and American universities, Williams, now a U.S. citizen, joined the world of the Foreign Service. He takes the reader on his assignments to Taegu, Bombay, and Seoul as an officer of the U.S. Information Agency. There are delightful stories of cultural discovery and cultural clash. Williams had his share of "brushes with history" -- he was in Taegu, Korea, preparing to receive the Jose Limon Dance company for performances, for instance, when President Kennedy was killed. Disappointed by the lack of opportunity for African Americans to rise in the Foreign Service, however, Williams resigned. His reports of racism in the Foreign Service of the 1960s are painful to read. A major share of the book -- both controversial and heartfelt at the same time -- is given to tracing the efforts of African American Foreign Service Officers to secure legal redress for discriminatory treatment. Williams continued as a federal executive in the Department of Transportation and the White House Conference on Minority Business. The reader enters a few more worlds on the way -- the world of helping Vietnam veterans, the world of electoral politics in the District of Columbia (Williams ran for city council in 1974), and the world of minority contracting. "Diplomacy" implies work