Baptist Minister and Champion of Religious Freedom Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook Lives a Life of Faith

As America celebrates Juneteenth as a national holiday for the first time, we feature a profile on Sujay, Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook, the first African-American and first woman to hold the position of U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom.

Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook, first African-American and first woman to hold the position of U.S. Ambassador for International Religious Freedom.
Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook, first African-American and first woman to hold the position of U.S. Ambassador for International Religious Freedom (U.S. State Department)
 

Eight months into a yearlong fellowship at the White House in 1994, the Reverend Suzan Johnson Cook was summoned to a room in the West Wing for a meeting of President Bill Clinton’s leading appointees. As the story goes, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros burst into the gathering and announced that Johnson Cook, a veteran Baptist minister and native New Yorker who would go on to become the U.S. State Department’s Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom under President Obama, was his ideal choice to lead a federal plan to recruit religious congregations in the government’s long-running struggles against gangs and guns in government housing projects.

Described by Cisneros as “dramatic, magnetic, intelligent,” Johnson Cook, better known by her nickname Sujay, had all the credentials for an ideal lynchpin between the White House and the nation’s religious pulpits:

She was the first African-American woman to be named pastor by the American Baptist Association in its 200-year history, not to mention the first female chaplain to the New York Police Department, where she served as inspector for 21 years. She represented President Clinton at the National Baptist Convention, which had never before invited her to its annual meeting as pastor. And she served on the Domestic Policy Council in the White House, helping develop and implement a range of President Clinton’s policy decisions and programs.

“I had the juice all around me,” she said, recalling that West Wing moment when she was tapped for one of the most high-profile government jobs in community relations. And yet Sujay turned down the job offer. “There’s no price tag you can put on the mission,” she explained, recalling verses from the Book of Matthew in which Jesus in the wilderness refuses to be tempted by worldly glories. “You start on it, and you keep going until you’re released by God.”

Faith untainted by the trappings of life has always been at the very center of Ambassador Sujay’s existence. “In the Black church world,” she said at a 2019 conference on religious diversity in the workplace organized by the Religious Freedom and Business Foundation, “it wasn’t church on Sunday and then you lived the rest of your life. Faith undergirded what our lives were.”

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Sujay became known as “America’s chaplain” for the role she played in helping people of various faiths cope with trauma. New Yorkers thronged a building just a block from the World Trade Center, where she had long held a lunchtime midday service called Wonderful Wall Street Wednesday.

“Half an hour on Wednesday people were able to come together and have an aha moment about their faith and celebrate who they were and then take that back to their workplace,” she recalled.

As U.S. State Department’s Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom from 2011 to 2013, Sujay oversaw issues surrounding religious freedom in 199 countries. She traveled to 54 of those nations—29 of them officially—enriching her understanding of foreign cultures.

Ambassador Sujay is the author of Too Blessed to be Stressed: Words of Wisdom for Women on the Move, a 2002 book she describes as “scriptural steps to burnout prevention.” She is also founder of ProVoice/ProVoz, a multifaith, multicultural nonprofit dedicated to bringing together women in the New York City and Washington, D.C., areas.

“We have three Cs—conversations, connections, celebrations,” she said at the 2019 Religious Freedom and Business Foundation conference on diversity in the workplace. “And that’s a good point for us to begin to look at celebrations religiously—and non—that are important to people. Things like a baby blessing. Just to be invited to a baby blessing of a different faith—to know what the important rituals are, to understand them.”

Ambassador Sujay, who has a master’s degree in education from Columbia University, served as President Clinton’s only faith advisor on the President’s Initiative on Race, a program launched in June 1997 that Clinton described as intended “to bring all Americans together in a national effort to find common ground within our different racial backgrounds.”

Her ambassadorship deepened Sujay’s understanding of various cultures. One aspect of that awareness and knowledge “is that we realized that where there is the expression of religion, there is peace in the environment,” she said at the 2019 conference. “And so when you talk about extremism, that’s where people aren’t able to exercise their faith.”

In fact, faith is fast becoming a crucial feature of America’s business landscape. “Now a lot of corporations are not only having chaplains of different faiths but they are also including the faith community in their corporate boards,” she said. “When we talk about diversity, people think women and men, black and white and Asian. But there are also faith leaders at the table who bring another perspective as well.”

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U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sujay Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook Juneteenth
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