served as Commissioner General of the Ministry of the Colonies with supervision of military personnel from the colonies and workers from France's African possessions. He represented France in the International Labor Office, the secretariat of the International Labour Organization, in 1930. From January 1931 to February 1932 he was Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, a junior level cabinet position. From 1920 to 1934 he served as mayor of Dakar. He died in Cambo-les-Bains in 1934. Legacy He was a pioneer of African electoral politics and an advocate of equal rights for all, regardless of race. He encouraged African accommodation of French rule and the adoption of French cultural and social norms. Though he was ahead of his time in 1914, by the later years of his life, African colonial politics had passed him by. He continued to advocate an African role in France while most Western-educated African elites embraced African nationalism and worked for eventual independence from the colonial powers. African-American historian and Pan-Africanist W. E. B. Du Bois faulted him harshly for a perceived lack of commitment to African interests "...Diagne is a Frenchman who is accidentally black. I suspect Diagne rather despises his own black Wolofs." It is alleged that he was not buried in the Muslim cemetery of Soumbedioune in Dakar because of his freemasonry. However, a large boulevard () and a high school () in Dakar were named in his honor, as well as Senegal's new international airport, Blaise Diagne International Airport in Ndiass, outside of Dakar. His son Raoul was the first black man to play professional football in France and had great success playing for Racing Club de France in the late 1930s, winning the French title in 1936 and the French cup in 1936, 1939, and 1940. His like-named grandson was born in Paris in 1954 to his son Adolphe (1907–1985, a French medical officer). The younger Blaise became mayor of the French village of Lourmarin in the Lubéron mountains of Provence in 2001 and was reelected in 2008. According to him the memory of his grandfather was scarcely mentioned within the family, "but my parents have always been very discreet about this family history" (). His mother and grandmother were both French "white" women. When interviewed in 2005, the younger Blaise said he had not traveled to Senegal since 1960 and thought he "has nothing to bring there". See also List