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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axe Files, with your host David Axelrod.

I sat down this week at the Institute of Politics with Linda Thomas Greenfield, the new US ambassador to the United Nations,

whose personal journey from her childhood in the segregated south in small town Louisiana to her distinguished 35-year career in the Foreign Service is a remarkable story.

We talked about that and the many urgent issues on her plate today. Here's that conversation.

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Ambassador Linda Thomas Greenfield, it's great to be with you. Welcome to the Institute of Politics and welcome to the Axe Files.

Well, thank you very much. I'm really delighted to be here. So I mean, it's such an honor for me.

Well, and likewise, you know, there's so much to talk about, but I want to start with your own story. It's a long way from Baker, Louisiana, to the rarefied air of the United Nations.

And tell me a little bit about your family and growing up in Baker during a very fraught time there in the 50s and 60s when the Civil Rights Movement was really growing.

You know, Baker is a small rural town just outside of Baton Rouge. So when I meet people and they ask me where I'm from, I usually will say Baton Rouge unless they know Louisiana.

And, but we lived an isolated segregated environment. I have to say that in my early years as a little kid running around our little rural town, I didn't understand or see or feel racism because I was in a community that embraced me.

I was going to segregated school where the teachers lived in our community and the teachers embraced us. My friends were in the community with me.

So it was comfortable to be honest, comfortable in the sense that I didn't get that daily worry about being confronted with races.

That said, my parents were living every day with the challenges of racism. My mother was a maid in the early years working for my family's process, we're being burned in our communities on the weekend.

And give us the message to stay in our place. But again, as a little kid, you don't see the threat of all of that. I only started to understand the threat as I started to move outside of our community.

And then you're a descendant of your great, I guess your great-great-grandmother was the daughter of an enslaved person. And your folks, I don't think, got much formal education.

No, my grandmother, great-grandmother, lived in the house with the best, it was my father's grandmother Mary. And she was born in 1865 and she died in 1965 at a hundred years old.

My biggest regret in life is that I didn't have the wherewithal to ask her questions about her life. I just never thought about it. And every day I regret that I didn't talk to her more about how she started and where she came from.

My father was taken out of school when he was in third grade to work on his family's, the work for his family, they didn't have a farm, but they had gardens and his father passed away.

So he was the oldest son and he had to help out. And I didn't realize until I was in probably high school that he couldn't read, because he was so smart and he was so intelligent and he kept it from us.

My mother could be, she went to school to eighth grade and the town that she grew up in, a black school, stopped at eighth grade. So if you wanted to go beyond eighth grade, you had to move away.

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