*President-elect Joe Biden on Monday named Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a Black woman who held a top diplomatic post in the Obama administration, as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Born in 1952, Baker served as the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the United States Department of State’s Bureau of African Affairs from 2013 to 2017. She’s also a senior counselor at Albright Stonebridge Group in Washington, DC.
The decorated diplomat grew up in Baker, La., where segregation and racism were harsh realities of her early life and college years at Louisiana State University. But life’s biggest test would come during her service in Rwanda during the genocide in 1994 where she found herself held at gunpoint. What do you do when faced with that kind of adversity? How do you survive?
In the gripping TED Talk below Thomas-Greenfield describes that surreal moment, the choice she made and the lesson her mother taught her that helped her survive.
