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Dr. Perkins, whose grandparents had been born into slavery, rose to the upper reaches of the State Department. He became the United States’ first Black ambassador to South Africa, serving during the last bitter decade of the system that had come to be called apartheid.

In addition to his ambassadorial postings, which also included Liberia and Australia, he became director general of the Foreign Service and helped recruit young officers from beyond the Ivy League. He became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and in 1992 served as U.S. representative to the United Nations Security Council.

After he retired from the Foreign Service in 1996, he spent a dozen years at the University of Oklahoma, directing its International Programs Center and teaching geopolitics.

“We just lost a giant of diplomacy,” Susan Rice, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in the Obama administration, wrote on Twitter after Dr. Perkins’s death. “Pioneer among African Americans, champion of a diverse Foreign Service.”

 

Concerned that Reagan was naming a Black ambassador as a symbolic gesture because he did not want to confront South Africa in a substantive way, some Black leaders urged Dr. Perkins to refuse the appointment. Among them was the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader, who told reporters that having Dr. Perkins serve as the intermediary between Reagan and President P.W. Botha of South Africa would put him in “the same humiliating posture of asking a Jewish person to be a messenger between Hitler and a reactionary administration.”

But Dr. Perkins’s wife reminded him that as a member of the Foreign Service he had vowed to go wherever he was needed. He accepted the posting.

 

Edward Joseph Perkins Jr. was born on June 8, 1928, in Sterlington, La. His father was an evangelical minister who traveled from church to church to lead revivals. His mother, Tiny Estelle (Noble) Perkins, was a schoolteacher.

His parents divorced when he was a toddler, and he lived for a time with his maternal grandparents, who had been born into slavery and had not learned to read. In their town of Pleasant Grove, La., school ended for Black students in the sixth grade, so he moved with his mother and her new husband, who was also a minister, to Pine Bluff. They later moved to Portland, Ore., where he finished high school.

He decided to become a diplomat after attending lectures by former diplomats at a local international relations club. After high school, he was determined to see the world and joined the Army for three years. After returning to civilian life, he still longed to see the world and was eager to become more disciplined, so he joined the Marine Corps, serving for four years in Korea, Hawaii and Japan.

When he left the Marines, he took a civilian job with the Army and Air Forces Exchange Services in Taiwan, where he met Lucy Ching-mei Liu. They wanted to marry, but her parents objected to her marrying a man who was not Chinese. They eloped to Taiwan and married in 1962.

In addition to his daughter Katherine, Dr. Perkins is survived by another daughter, Sarah Perkins, and four grandchildren. His wife died in 2009.

While stationed in Taipei and Okinawa, Dr. Perkins enrolled in a program through the University of Maryland that allowed him to earn a bachelor’s degree in public administration and political science in 1967.

 

 

After a stint at the Agency for International Development, he passed the rigorous Foreign Service exam in 1971. While working in administrative jobs at the State Department, he studied at a satellite campus of the University of Southern California in Washington and earned his master’s degree in 1972 and his doctorate in 1978, both in public administration.

He always maintained that he was not bitter, despite facing hardships in the segregated South and racial obstacles along the way. In a 2007 interview with the University of Southern California, he recalled the words of his grandmother:

“You take what you’ve got and you keep on walking,” he said she had told him. “If you stop in the middle of the road, you won’t go anywhere.”