“Apartheid South Africa was on fire around me.” So begins the memoir of Academy Fellow and Career Foreign Service Officer Edward J. Perkins, the first black U.S. ambassador to South Africa.
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan gave him an unparalleled assignment: dismantle apartheid without violence. As he fulfilled this assignment, Perkins faced enormous challenges posed by the American media, Afrikaner government, white South African citizens, and initially black South African revolutionaries. It was Perkins’ advice to President-elect George H.W. Bush that helped modify American policy and hasten the release of Nelson Mandela and others from prison.
Perkins’s up-by-your-bootstraps life took him from a cotton farm in segregated Louisiana to the U.S. Foreign Service, where he became the first black officer to ascend to the top position of director general.
This is the story of how one man turned the page of history.
