Clifton R. Wharton Sr.

Clifton Reginald Wharton Sr. was born on the eleventh of May 1899 at Baltimore, Maryland, the son of an Black-Baltimore household of post-Reconstruction merchant-and-property-owning standing of the Druid Hill district of West Baltimore. The family moved to Boston in 1903, and Wharton was raised in the Black middle-class Boston of the early twentieth century.

He was placed at the Boston English High School and at Boston University, completing the bachelor’s in 1920 cum laude — among the first Black graduates of the Boston University post-war class.

He took the LL.B. at the Boston University Law School in 1923 and the LL.M. at the same institution in 1924.

He was admitted in 1923 to the Massachusetts state bar and entered private practice at Boston in 1923 for one year. He took the United States Foreign Service entrance examination on the seventh of December 1924 — having been the first African American to sit the examination — and ranked first in the class of 1924. He was sworn in on the twentieth of March 1925 as the first African American Foreign Service Officer at the career-officer rank.

He served the Foreign Service for thirty-nine years from 1925 to 1964 — the principal Black-American career diplomatic officer of the inter-war and the war and the post-war periods, predominantly at the United States consulates and embassies of the Atlantic-coastal capitals of the Atlantic-Caribbean-and-North-African circuit.

He held junior consular and embassy posts at Monrovia, Liberia (1925–1927), Las Palmas in the Spanish Canary Islands (1927–1929), Madeira, Portugal (1929–1937), Lisbon, Portugal (1937–1942), Brazzaville, French Equatorial Africa (1942–1946), Boma, Belgian Congo (1942–1944), Cape Town, Union of South Africa (1944–1949), Marseille, France (1949–1953), Tananarive, French Madagascar (1953–1957), and the Department of State Bureau of European Affairs (1957–1958).

He was nominated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on the twenty-second of November 1957 as Ambassador to the Romanian People’s Republic and was confirmed by the Senate on the second of December 1957. He presented his credentials at Bucharest on the seventeenth of March 1958 — the first African American to hold the rank of Ambassador as chief of an American mission, having served prior posts as Minister Resident and Consul-General.

Wharton’s appointment as the first African American Ambassador thus rests on the recognition that several earlier African American chiefs of mission — Bassett (placed in this archive), Douglass (placed in this archive), and others — held the Minister Resident and Consul-General ranks under the pre-1893 American diplomatic-personnel system, before the establishment of the rank of Ambassador. Wharton was the first African American to hold the rank of Ambassador under the post-1893 personnel system.

He served the Bucharest Embassy from 1958 to 1960 — across the principal United States diplomatic engagement with the Gheorghiu-Dej and the Maurer administrations of the period.

He was nominated by President John F. Kennedy on the eighteenth of January 1961 as Ambassador to the Kingdom of Norway and was confirmed by the Senate on the twenty-fifth of January 1961.

He served the Oslo Embassy from 1961 to 1964 — across the principal United States Norwegian-NATO engagement of the period.

His son Clifton R. Wharton Jr. was the first African American Chancellor of the State University of New York (1978–1987) and the United States Deputy Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton (1993).

He died at Cape Cod, Massachusetts on the twenty-third of April 1990 of complications of pneumonia, at ninety.

He is honored here as the first Black Foreign Service career officer.