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MICHEL MARTIN, host:
I'm Michel Martin, and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News.
Just ahead, tips on how to get your car unstuck from the snow. I know, I know - this is old news to some. But some of us need that refresher course. So we'll have that for you in just a few minutes. But first, we have another conversation from our Black History Month series. We've been focusing on new news about black history: scholarship and information that has emerged in recent decades and that most people know a little about.
Here to tell us one of those little-known stories is Adele Logan Alexander. She's professor of history at George Washington University and a member of the National Council on the Humanities. She's also author of "Parallel Worlds," a new book that details the lives of William Henry Hunt and Ida Gibbs Hunt. He was the first African-American to serve a complete career in U.S. diplomacy. Now, that might not seen like a big deal now that the country has its first African-American president, is currently represented at the United Nations by an African-American woman and has seen not one, but two African-Americans in charge of the State Department. But William Henry Hunt, along with his wife Ida Hunt, got his start in diplomacy back in 1898.
Here to tell us more is Professor Adele Logan Alexander. Professor Alexander, welcome. Thank you for joining us.
Professor ADELE LOGAN ALEXANDER (History, George Washington University; Member, National Council on the Humanities): Thank you for having me, Michel.
MARTIN: How did you become aware of this story?
Prof. ALEXANDER: I first became aware of this story back some 25 years ago when I was doing research in a course in international diplomacy, U.S. diplomacy at Howard University. And I wrote a long seminar paper on black women as internationalists, which was something that I didn't know anything about and nobody had ever written about. So I came across Ida Gibbs Hunt at that point. And her husband, William Henry Hunt, who, as you said, was the first African- American who had a full career with the State Department, was a remarkable person, and we don't know anything about them. But marvelously, there's lot...