Outside his hometown of Roanoke, Edward R. Dudley lived a life of a civil rights hero.
Special assistant counsel to Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.
First African American to run for statewide office in New York on the ticket of a major party.
First African American to serve as an administrative judge in New York State.
And most prominent: first African American U.S. ambassador.
But within Roanoke? “He’s such a brilliant guy, my dad,” lamented his 81-year-old son, Edward Dudley Jr. “But nobody knows about him.”
Until now.
Thanks to the efforts of a white minister, whose passion for local history rivals his Sunday sermons, Dudley’s legacy will soon be commemorated on a historical marker near his childhood home in Roanoke’s Gainsboro neighborhood.
“We often forget a lot of local history because it’s not taught in school,” said Nelson Harris, former Roanoke mayor, pastor of Heights Community Church and avid historian. “The more we can know about our locality and the events and the individuals and the institutions that have been part of our history, the better we’ll be. The story of Edward Dudley is inspirational and aspirational, and I think we need to be reminded through this marker that we had tremendous individuals who grew up in Gainsboro and went on to national prominence.”
His father a dentist and his mother a teacher, Dudley can’t be considered “born and raised” in Roanoke because his mother went into labor in 1911 while traveling back from visiting family in North Carolina, said Harris. His impending birth precipitated an emergency detour to South Boston.
Back in Roanoke, Dudley grew up on Gilmer Avenue next door to another future civil rights icon, Oliver Hill, and eventually graduated from segregated Lucy Addison High School.
Dudley left Roanoke for stints as a teacher and busdriver for a one-room school, a dentistry student at Howard University, and an assistant stage manager in a Works Progress Administration theater in New York where he got to work alongside Dooley Wilson of “Casablanca” fame and Orson Welles.
In 1941, he graduated St. John’s University School of Law and worked for Pepsi-Cola until he was recruited by Marshall, who was then chief counsel of the Legal Defense and Education Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to become a special assistant counsel at the fund.
According to a biography written for the Historical Society of the New York Courts: “In this period, before Brown v. Board of Education, [Dudley] worked on cases and wrote briefs seeking the admission of black students to colleges in the south, equal pay for black teachers, such as he had once been, and non-discriminatory public transportation. He also worked on voting rights cases.”
At the urging of New York’s mayor, Dudley in 1945 became the legal counsel to the governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, and in 1948 was tapped by President Harry Truman as envoy to Liberia when the African country only merited a “mission” in Americans’ eyes.
But the following year, Truman decided to raise the status of the mission to an embassy, led by an ambassador, to help counter the danger of communism finding a foothold in Africa. The elevation made Dudley the first African American to serve as an ambassador for the United States.
His work fighting discrimination didn’t end there. Indeed, his campaign against the State Department’s culture of “pale, male and Yale” opened up the foreign service to Black officers even though it likely cost him advancement, said Harris and his son.
At the time, State Department protocol required the rotation of foreign service officers from “hardship posts,” like Latin American and African assignments, to embassies in Europe and other first-world nations in order to cultivate more well-rounded diplomats.
Black officers, though, languished for years in hardship posts without ever gaining more plum promotions.
Ruth Davis, former director general of the U.S. Foreign Service and first African American woman to be named a career ambassador, later recounted in “African-American Trailblazers in Diplomacy, a documentary about Dudley’s service: “If you don’t have African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic Americans, you name it — if you don’t have these people, you don’t have a Foreign Service that is reflective of the population, so it is very important to have that diversity so that we will have the diversity of thought as well as diversity of appearance.”
Dudley researched the issue and crafted a well-documented memorandum that he presented to the undersecretary of state.
According to the Historical Society of the New York Courts: “Within six months, transfers began to come through. The leading African-American Foreign Service Officer in Liberia was reassigned to Paris, the first time that had ever occurred anywhere in Europe. A second officer was sent to Zurich and a third to Rome. The State Department even moved the Ambassador’s code clerk and sent him to London.”
Dudley Jr. recalled, “That’s one of the things I’m most proud of. It was a situation where Black people were pigeonholed into hardship posts and sent to Black countries. As a result of his paper, which was at great risk to himself and as a result he wasn’t even considered again for promotion, he really changed the State Department.”
In 1953, Dudley returned to the U.S. to again work with the NAACP. In 1955, he received his first judicial appointment as judge on the Family Court in Manhattan. In 1964 he won election to the New York State Supreme Court, where he served until his retirement in 1985. He died 20 years later in 2005, shortly before his 94th birthday.
His legacy in Roanoke may have died with him were it not for Harris researching his latest history book, “The Roanoke Valley in the 1940s.” Scrolling microfiche of 80-year-old Roanoke Times articles, Harris kept seeing Dudley’s name pop up.
“I’m a lifelong Roanoker and before I started doing this 1940s book I had never heard of Edward Dudley,” Harris said. “Nothing is named for him, he’s not mentioned in local history. This individual has been long overlooked and really he’s a person of national if not international stature.”
Harris petitioned the Virginia Department of Historic Resources for a historical marker to be erected near Dudley’s childhood home in Roanoke’s Gainsboro neighborhood.
Earlier this month, his petition was approved. Harris is now working with the Roanoke branch of the NAACP to raise the $3,410 to pay for the marker, which is being manufactured by an Ohio foundry.
“Every neighborhood has a story and a history,” said Harris, “whether it’s a cautionary tale or an aspirational one, and the more we know that history, the better we’re able to understand our present and better plan for the future.”
Living now in Sag Harbor, New York, Dudley Jr. hopes to be on hand when the marker is unveiled in spring 2025 on the corner of Gainsboro Road and Gilmer Avenue.
“I tried to be a physicist in college just so I wouldn’t have to compete with him because he was such a smart guy,” laughed Dudley, who followed in his father’s footsteps as an attorney.
“He was a civil rights leader and a special guy in that when he was in a position of power he wanted to bring in more Blacks,” said Dudley. “People should really know what an exceptional person he was. I’d like them to know about him and be proud that he was a Virginian.”