- Date Of Birth: February 23, 1927
- Date Of Death: May 26, 2015
- State: Maryland
Ollie Benjamin Jefferson Ellison passed away from natural causes on May 26, 2015 at his Maryland home. As a distinguished career foreign service officer, he dutifully served the US State Department for 32 years from 1957 until 1989. Ellison was among the first African American foreign service officers.
Born in Muskogee, Oklahoma in 1927, Ellison was the son of Ollie B. Jefferson, the first African American attorney in Oklahoma in 1902 and then the chairman of the Negro Democratic Party. Ellison’s father is credited for turning the African American vote from Republican to Democratic during Franklin Roosevelt’s successive terms. His mother, a school teacher who encouraged him to read long before he was old enough to enter the first grade, later married Coleman Ellison, Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopalian Church. Ellison was the grandson of an Arkansas farmer and business man who was a former slave.
During his career at the US State Department, Ellison’s assignments abroad included Cairo, Egypt 1959 to 1964 and Bremen, Germany from 1967 to 1970. From 1974 to 1978, he served in Kinshasa, Zaire and Bangkok, Thailand from 1978 to 1981. Between 1981 to 1982, Ellison served in Bangui, Central African Republic and 1983 to 1989 in Geneva, Switzerland. During these assignments, Ellison met with several notable historic leaders and artists including, P.W. Botha, Oliver Tambo, Malcolm X and Maya Angelou.
In 1973, he authored the “Employment Practices of US Firms in South Africa”, which appeared in the Johannesburg Star and became known later as The Sullivan Principles. In Geneva, Ellison served as US representative to United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
Since his retirement in 1989, Ellison worked at the National Archives declassification department. His foreign service career was recently featured in the US State Department’s State Magazine (February 2013) and a 2014 oral history project, The History Makers, which was celebrated at a Library of Congress dinner, “An Evening with Gwen Ifill.” An avid lover of classical and operatic music, Ellison devoted his leisure time to travel, occasional concerts, the continuous mastery of the German language, cooking, reading, and the warmth and company of his family and friends.
