Elliot P. Skinner

Elliott Percival Skinner was born on the twentieth of June 1924 at Port of Spain, Trinidad, the son of an East-Indian-Trinidadian and Black-Trinidadian household of the Port of Spain Maraval district. He was raised in the bilingual French-and-English Catholic Afro-Trinidadian community of the late colonial period.

He emigrated to New York at sixteen in 1940 with his family at the closing year of the British Caribbean migration to the United States. He was placed at the New York City schools and at the New York University, where he served as a Caribbean-American post-war social-sciences student until called up to the United States Army in 1943.

He served the United States Army from 1943 to 1946 in the Pacific Theatre of Operations as a non-commissioned officer in the segregated 93rd Infantry Division. He took the bachelor’s in anthropology at New York University in 1951 magna cum laude, and the doctor of philosophy in anthropology at Columbia University in 1955 — the first African American to receive the Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Columbia.

He completed at Columbia in 1955 the doctoral dissertation The Mossi of the Upper Volta — on the principal Mossi-Burkinabé political-and-economic anthropology — under Charles Wagley. The dissertation was published in 1964 as The Mossi of the Upper Volta: The Political Development of a Sudanese People at the Stanford University Press — the principal English-language Mossi political anthropology of the period.

He was hired in 1955 by the New York University as instructor of anthropology and rose by 1959 to professor. He moved in 1962 to Columbia University as professor of anthropology and held the Columbia chair for the next thirty-five years — the longest Black-occupied chair at Columbia University in the period.

He was nominated by President Lyndon Johnson on the seventeenth of June 1966 as Ambassador to the Republic of Upper Volta — subsequently the Republic of Burkina Faso — and was confirmed by the Senate on the twentieth of June 1966. He presented his credentials at Ouagadougou on the seventh of December 1966.

He served the Upper Volta Embassy across the principal United States diplomatic engagement with the closing years of the General Sangoulé Lamizana régime at Ouagadougou from 1966 to 1969. He was the principal United States diplomatic representative at the Upper Volta of the closing years of the United States Peace Corps Upper Volta operation and the United States Agency for International Development at the small West African Sahel.

He was named in February 1978 a Career Ambassador of the United States Foreign Service — the first African American to attain the rank of Career Ambassador in the history of the Foreign Service. He took the Career Ambassador rank as a State Department personnel-administration appointment rather than as a continuing diplomatic-mission appointment.

He returned to Columbia University in 1969 as the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology — the senior anthropology chair at Columbia, named after the founder of the Columbia anthropology department — and held the Boas chair for twenty-six years until 1995.

He published across the post-Upper-Volta Columbia period the principal works on the Mossi-Burkinabé and the African-American international-relations — among them African Urban Life (1974), The Restless Africans (1977), Beyond Constructive Engagement (1986), and African Americans and U.S. Policy Towards Africa (1992).

He died at New York on the first of April 2007 of complications of cancer, at eighty-two.

He is honored here as the first Black Career Ambassador of the Foreign Service.