By Katrina Dix
For years at Thanksgiving, Vinecia Bunch, office services assistant for the Department of Political Science & Geography at 鶹ý, politely declined an invitation to spend the holiday with Ambassador Bismarck Myrick Sr. and his family – but he always made sure to ask.
“He didn’t think anyone should be alone or go hungry on Thanksgiving,” Bunch recalled. Myrick, who retired from his post as the University’s Ambassador-in-Residence in the spring after 22 years teaching political science and history, died Sept. 29 and will be interred at Arlington National Cemetery in January. He was 83.
Myrick was well-known for the community Thanksgiving dinners he hosted for hundreds, but faculty and administrators said that few at the University realized the extent of his other accomplishments – or that his decades of teaching were his third career, following equally long stints in the U.S. Army and Foreign Service.
The ambassador could have been much better known if he’d put himself forward, but that wasn’t his way, said longtime colleague Regina Karp, Ph.D., the director of graduate studies for the political science department. She gave one of several eulogies at Myrick’s memorial service last month.
“Despite all his successes, he remained a very humble man,” Dr. Karp said.
Among the many things Dr. Karp learned from Ambassador Myrick, she said, was how to listen.
“He was a good listener, but he was also very invested in people,” she said. “In a way, although I know he encountered significant racism in his early years, he had a kind of innocence to him that was very endearing. You could not move him away from this very basic conviction that if you invested in people, that is how you effect change.”
Born Dec. 23, 1940, in Portsmouth, Myrick enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1959. He served with military police in Japan and Germany before eventually serving as an infantry company commander in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969, according to his State Department biography. His awards included the Silver Star, the Purple Heart and four Bronze Stars for heroism in combat.
After 20 years in the military, Myrick joined the Foreign Service in 1980 and served as a career diplomat, including two appointments as ambassador, first to Lesotho in 1995 and then to Liberia in 1999.
In a 1995 Virginian-Pilot interview before the appointment ceremony for his first ambassadorship, Myrick barely acknowledged the challenges of his childhood: growing up as the oldest of 12 children in a public housing project with a single parent. Instead, he stressed the advantage he found through his participation in the Boy Scouts and his church choir, citing the inspiration of his community.
Many who knew him said that his catchphrase, uttered all over the world, was “Where you come from by no means determines where you will go.”
One of the most memorable times in his career, he said in a 2013 interview with the Chesapeake Citizen, was being the first Black American consul general for Durban, South Africa, in 1990 when anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years of imprisonment – four years before Mandela became South Africa’s first president.
“‘This was perhaps the most profound international development of any place in the world, with the possible exception of the collapse of the Soviet Union,’” the Chesapeake Citizen quoted Myrick as saying. “‘I was the first African-American to head the U.S. diplomatic mission in Durban. This was a country that had gone through a half century of racial separation where people were prohibited from social interactions between race groups, so it was a challenging and sensitive time.’”
In 2002, Myrick joined the teaching faculty at 鶹ý and was later appointed to a specially created role as Ambassador-in-Residence.
“In terms of what he would have liked to be remembered for, and what I hope people will remember him for, is his service,” said Austin Agho, Ph.D., who currently serves as Chief Integration Officer & Senior Advisor to the President.
The pair were fast friends after Myrick reached out when Dr. Agho joined the administration in 2016, he said.
Dr. Agho sees the ambassador’s legacy at 鶹ý as one of mentorship not only for students, but especially for faculty and administrators, who saw him as a resource and sought him out for advice.
“In terms of the students we have at 鶹ý, the majority are first-generation students. To have somebody like him on campus, I believe makes a big difference,” Dr. Agho said. “He’s somebody who had to pretty much navigate his way through life, and when you see somebody like that, it’s such a shining example of what you can achieve.”
There’s an African saying, Dr. Agho said, that translates loosely to the idea that life is like a marketplace where some people squander their God-given talents, while others use them wisely. In his view, Ambassador Myrick used his remarkably well.
“I’m going to miss the man. He was a good human being.”