Better Know Tom Perriello, Biden's New Sudan Envoy

Activist-War Crimes Prosecutor-NGO Leader-Politician-Diplomat

Tom Perriello. State Department photo/ Public Domain

Congressman Virgil Goode was one of those old Southern racists straight out of central casting. Like many white men of his time and place, Goode started out as a Democrat and won his first election to the Virginia State Senate in the early 1970s. By the mid-1990s, after two failed attempts to win a US Senate seat, he managed to win election to the US House of Representatives.

In 2006, Goode was joined in the US House of Representatives by Keith Ellison, an African American from Minnesota and the first Muslim ever elected to Congress. In the tumultuous days of the Bush administration, this was a significant event! It was after 9/11 and in the midst of the Iraq war. Anti-Muslim racism was a powerful driving force in American politics. Ellison sought to counter the prevailing political mood by reminding Americans of the pluralism of the Founding Fathers. He asked the Library of Congress to lend him a Quran owned by Thomas Jefferson on which he could take the Oath of Office.

White racists objected to this—none louder than Virgil Goode, who represented Jefferson’s birthplace in Albemarle County and was now one of the most right-wing Republicans in Congress. Goode sent out the following letter to his constituents:

"When I raise my hand to take the oath on Swearing-In Day, I will have the Bible in my other hand. I do not subscribe to using the Quran in any way. The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district, and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Quran."

One election later, in 2008, Goode was ousted from Congress by a 34-year-old NGO leader who cut his teeth doing human rights work in Sierra Leone.

It was a narrow victory, by under 800 votes. But Tom Perriello ended Goode’s political career. (For that act alone, we owe him a debt of gratitude.) Perriello did not last long in Congress, though. The district was overwhelmingly Republican, and he served just one term. By the mid-2010s, he had joined the Obama administration, serving in foreign policy roles, eventually becoming the President’s Special Envoy to the Great Lakes Region of Africa.

Yesterday, the State Department announced that Tom Perriello will reprise his role as an envoy for Africa, this time as the new US Special Envoy to Sudan. “Special Envoy Perriello will coordinate the U.S. policy on Sudan and advance our efforts to end hostilities, secure unhindered humanitarian access, and support the Sudanese people as they seek to fulfill their aspirations for freedom, peace, and justice,” Antony Blinken said in a press release announcing the appointment.

Needless to say, this is a daunting task. As Global Dispatchers will be aware, Sudan is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world by the numbers—and it is getting worse. A genocidal paramilitary has the upper hand in a civil war that turns one year old in April. The fighting has caused massive displacement inside Sudan and over Sudan’s borders, particularly to Chad, where civilians are fleeing a campaign of ethnic cleansing that may have crossed the threshold to genocide. Meanwhile, key policymakers in the West—including the Biden Administration—appear too distracted by Gaza and Ukraine to help steer the conflict in Sudan in a better direction. (We have a dedicated vertical on GlobalDispatches.org to this crisis if you’d like to learn more.)

Who is Tom Perriello?

In the final days of the Obama administration, while he served in a similar role for the Great Lakes Region of Africa, Perriello sat down with me for a long conversation about his life and career.

This was for an earlier version of the podcast. Global Dispatches is the longest-running independent international affairs podcast—we’ve been publishing since 2013!—and the first couple of hundred episodes were in-depth conversations with people who lead interesting lives and careers in foreign policy. We’d go deep into their backgrounds and upbringing, sometimes in very personal ways. We’d also have interesting digressions about the key foreign policy events and debates in which their lives intersected. You really got to know the personal story and motivations of people who make foreign policy or otherwise shape how we understand the world.

In our conversation, recorded in 2016, Perriello discusses his upbringing in Virginia, his work on transitional justice and human rights in Sierra Leone in the depths of the civil war in the early 2000s, founding the activist platform Avaaz, besting Virgil Goode in Congress, and then entering the Obama administration to work on Africa policy.

It was a great discussion that is suddenly very relevant. After listening to my conversation with Tom Perriello, you will better understand the roots of the new Sudan Envoy’s approach to diplomacy and his theory of change.

The podcast episode is available below the fold for paying subscribers. Thank you for your support.