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The Reverend Dr. Suzan Johnson Cook is a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker who is now one of the most influential women at the State Department.

"I’m a homegirl for real. Native New Yorker, born in Sydenham Hospital [in Harlem], fifth floor,” she says.

Now she is moving on up. "Dr. Sujay," as she is known in the Big Apple, was sworn in just weeks ago as the third United States Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom.

"We cover 198 countries, so the ambassador at large for International Religious Freedom is the chief advisor to the president of the United States and the secretary of state," says Johnson Cook. "In our country, we have rights to religious freedom, but there are many places in the world that do not.”

The newly-minted ambassador hit the ground running in her new post. Fresh off a trip from Geneva where she addressed the Human Rights Council, the reverend became nostalgic when she spoke at the New York Theological Seminary in Morningside Heights, Manhattan.

"My parents, who in this generation had to pick cotton and tobacco in the fields, and here I am, able to walk past the fields and be able to sit at the table with kings, queens," she says. "So I stand on their honor and their legacy.”

It was not an easy road to the State Department. It took about two years and two senate confirmation hearings to seal the deal.

The mother of two teenage boys says her background as a pastor of two New York City churches helped prepare her for this moment.

“It’s faith, it’s politics, it’s international travel, which is the fusion of who I am," she says.

Johnson Cook, who now lives in Washington, D.C., says she is eager to promote religious freedom around the world and prides herself as a true "Harlem globetrotter."