Edward Dudley Jr. didn’t know the extent of his father’s accomplishments until the two began playing bridge together after his father retired, and when he began to do research on his own.
He describes his father and his work as “unknown.”
“I think part of it is that he didn’t care about pushing his own accomplishments,” he said. “That’s the type of person he was.”
So, Nelson Harris, a former mayor of Roanoke and a Roanoke historian, pushed Edward Dudley’s accomplishments for him with a successful application to the Department of Historic Resources for a historic marker.
Edward Dudley marker
The Edward Dudley historical marker will be unveiled at 2 p.m. Thursday at the corner of Gilmer Avenue and Gainsboro Road in Roanoke.
The event is free and open to the public.
On Thursday, Dudley will be recognized in his childhood neighborhood, Gainsboro, with a historic marker that will detail his life’s work:
First Black man to run for statewide office in New York on the ticket of a major party and to serve as an administrative judge in New York state, counsel to Thurgood Marshall, an educator and first Black U.S. ambassador.
Harris said he came across Dudley’s story while he was doing research for a book on Roanoke’s history.
While scrolling through newspaper microfilm from decades past, Harris said he became aware of Dudley’s appointment as first emissary to Liberia before moving up to the rank of ambassador to Liberia. He soon realized, he said, that “there was so much more to the life and career of Edward Dudley beyond his being an ambassador.”
Early civil rights work
Dudley grew up on Gilmer Avenue in the Gainsboro neighborhood in the 1910s and ’20s — next door to Oliver Hill, another renowned civil rights attorney.
“I mean, that’s just remarkable in itself,” Harris said. “These are two legal giants.”
After attending a segregated Lucy Addison High School, he became a teacher in Virginia and even drove a school bus. This is where he saw first-hand the reality of Black teachers being paid half what their white counterparts were paid.
He left teaching to attend Howard University’s dental school, where he stayed for just a year.
According to the New York Courts government page, he then attended St. John’s School of Law in New York City and was soon recruited by Thurgood Marshall, who was then chief counsel of the Legal Defense and Education Fund of the NAACP, before going on to become a Supreme Court justice Dudley became a special assistant counsel at the fund.
In a pre-Brown v. Board of Education America, Dudley worked cases seeking the admission of Black students into colleges in the South and equal pay for Black teachers.
“Thurgood was very careful before he brought Brown v. Board of Education to test the waters, you know, by bringing these other cases out,” said Dudley Jr. “He felt that a setback could set the movement back 50 years. So they wanted to be sure.”
Dudley Jr. said he absolutely thinks his father’s and Marshall’s work with these early cases aided in the success of Brown v. Board in 1954.
He said he had gone through college himself before he learned of his father’s involvement in these historic court cases.
His work abroad
In 1948, President Harry Truman appointed Dudley as envoy to Liberia, which began as a mission but was soon an embassy with an ambassadorship for Dudley to counter communism in Africa.
This made Dudley the first Black man to serve as an ambassador for the U.S.
He soon recognized a pattern of discrimination within the State Department: Black individuals were sent to “hardship posts” for longer than their white counterparts, without being promoted to higher-status positions in first-world countries, many in Europe.
“They would go from Haiti to Liberia to Madagascar, three or four of the Black posts, and usually remain there much longer,” Dudley Jr. said. His father prepared a paper with his findings and sent it to the department.
His actions helped end this pattern of discriminatory rotations, though Dudley Jr. said his being so “forceful” with the department “probably ruined his chances of getting an ambassadorship in Europe.”
“With things that were important to him, he didn’t worry about the consequences,” Dudley Jr. said. He said this work with the State Department is what he’s most proud of his father for.
In 1953, Dudley returned to the U.S. to work with the NAACP again. Two years later, he received his first judicial appointment, in Manhattan’s Family Court.
In 1962, he was the Democratic candidate for attorney general of New York but was defeated by incumbent Louis Lefkowitz. Still, this made him the first Black man to run for statewide office in New York on the ticket of a major party.
He won election to the New York State Supreme Court a couple of years later, and he served until his retirement in 1985.
He died in 2005, shortly before his 94th birthday.
A father and an ambassador
Dudley Jr. said he was mostly raised by his mother, but he’s not regretful thinking back on this.
He said he only really got to know the extent of his father’s accomplishments after his retirement, when the two began playing bridge together regularly. And he continued learning about his father after his death.
“A lot of us kids grew up really feeling inferior to whites,” Dudley Jr. said. “But my father absolutely knew he was as smart as anybody else. You know, he’s just one of those gifted people, and he just knew that he was gifted.”
His mother “was pretty fantastic herself,” he said. While he was in college in the 1960s, his mother, Rae Oley, was with a group of women called “Wednesdays in Mississippi.” On Wednesdays, the group would fly from New York to Montgomery, Alabama, and then drive to Mississippi to register Black voters.
He recalls being a “tight-knit family” — fishing with his father in the summer, watching his father play tennis, learning how to play chess.
“I just admire him and wish that I was as smart as him,” Dudley Jr. said. “I think it skipped a generation, but my kids are doing amazingly well.” He is an attorney in New York, and he has three kids himself.
Capturing a life on a marker
Harris seeks out people like Dudley who are worth remembering physically with a historic marker, and he sends applications to the Department of Historic Resources.
Harris said that Dudley’s story deserves to be recognized and that a lot of his civil rights work was overshadowed by his work with the State Department.
What draws Harris to seek out these historic markers, he said, is that “they do tell a story,” and they give the community “a snapshot” of an individual, place or event.
Harris has now had nine successful applications, with a potential 10th highlighting Arthur Taubman. Most have highlighted Roanoke’s Black and medical histories.
“I tell you,” Harris said, “the greatest satisfaction is if I’m driving around, and I drive by where one of the markers that I worked on is standing, and if I see a couple folks there reading it, that makes it all worthwhile.”
Harris said standing where Dudley’s marker will be, you can see the Claytor Memorial Clinic marker placed this summer and the Gainsboro Library marker.
“And here are three historic markers that tell something very significant about people and places in Roanoke and specifically in Gainsboro, that are quite remarkable.”
Dudley Jr. is traveling to Roanoke from New York for the unveiling on Thursday and said he is bringing letters of his father’s to give to the Gainsboro Library. He said his father was “selfless” in his career. “He did a great job in everything he did.”
“I’m a lucky kid that this is my dad,” he said.
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Correction 12:55 p.m. Dec. 13: Rae Oley worked to register Black voters in Mississippi. The location of her work was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.
