Ralph Bunche

Ralph Johnson Bunche (1904-1971) was the highest American official in the United Nations. For his conduct of negotiations leading to an armistice in the First Arab-Israeli War, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, the first African American to do so.

Abarber's son, Ralph Bunche was born in Detroit, Mich., on Aug. 7, 1904. His parents died when he was 13, and his maternal grandmother took Ralph and his young sister to live in Los Angeles. While going to school Ralph helped support the family by working as a janitor, carpet-layer, and seaman. His grandmother's indomitable will and her wisdom had a lasting influence on him.

Bunche attended the University of California at Los Angeles on scholarships and graduated in 1927. He earned a master's degree at Harvard University in 1928 and a doctorate in government and international relations at Harvard in 1934. His doctoral dissertation won the Tappan Prize as the best one in the social sciences that year. Later he did advanced work in anthropology at Northwestern University, the London School of Economics, and the University of Cape Town.

From 1928 to 1942 Bunche was a member (and chairman from 1937) of the department of political science at Howard University. He married Ruth Harris, one of his students, in 1930; the couple had three children. In 1950 he was appointed to the faculty of Harvard University, but after two successive leaves of absence he resigned in 1952 without having taught there.

An expert on colonialism, Bunche worked during World War II in the Office of Strategic Services as an analyst of African and Far Eastern affairs, moving in 1944 to the State Department, where he became head of the Division of Dependent Area Affairs. At Dumbarton Oaks in 1944, San Francisco in 1945, and London in 1946, he was active as an authority on trusteeship in the planning and establishment of the United Nations (UN). In 1947, at the invitation of Secretary General Trygve Lie, Bunche joined the UN Secretariat as director of the Trusteeship Division.

Lie and his successors, Dag Hammarskjöld and U Thant, gave special troubleshooting assignments to Bunche. In 1947 he was a member of the UN Special Committee on Palestine that recommended partition of the country into Jewish and Arab states. Arab refusal to accept the UN plan resulted in the First Arab-Israeli War. When the UN's chief mediator in that conflict, Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated in 1948, Bunche took his place. From January to June 1949 he presided over the difficult negotiations between Arab and Israeli delegations on the island of Rhodes that led eventually to an armistice. Both sides praised his achievement, and in 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.

In 1955 Bunche was named undersecretary without portfolio in the UN Secretariat and in 1957 undersecretary for special political affairs (in 1969 this title was changed to undersecretary general). He directed UN peace-keeping operations in the Suez area (1956), in the Congo (1960), and on the island of Cyprus (1964) and was also responsible for the UN's program in the peaceful uses of atomic energy. He became U Thant's most influential political adviser. In June 1971, fatally ill, Bunche retired from his post. He died in New York City on December 9.

The grandson of a slave, Bunche bore with great reserve the indignities of racial prejudice that he experienced. His lifelong concern about race relations was the source of his early desire to be a teacher and his later specialization in colonial problems. In 1936 he was codirector of the Institute of Race Relations at Swarthmore College. From 1938 to 1940, as a staff member of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, he served as chief aide to Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in his investigation of the race problem in the United States that led to Myrdal's influential book An American Dilemma. Bunche wrote or supervised 13 of the 81 volumes of manuscripts and memoranda submitted to Myrdal for the book. For 22 years Bunche was a member of the board of directors of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1965 he participated in marches in Selma and Montgomery, Ala., led by Martin Luther King, Jr., to protest racial discrimination.

Bunche received many honorary degrees and awards, and President John F. Kennedy presented him with the Medal of Freedom in 1963. Bunche was president of the American Political Science Association and a member of the Harvard University board of overseers.

Further Reading

Bunche wrote A World View of Race (1936; repr. 1968). Howard P. Linton compiled Ralph Johnson Bunche: Writings by and about Him from 1928 to 1966 (1967). A biography is J. Alvin Kugelmass, Ralph J. Bunche: Fighter for Peace (1962). There is a short biography of him in Wilhelmina S. Robinson, Historical Negro Biographies (1968). For examinations of the UN Secretariat and the UN's peace-keeping efforts see Sydney D. Bailey, The Secretariat of the United Nations (1962; rev. ed. 1964), and James M. Boyd, United Nations Peace-keeping Operations: A Military and Political Appraisal (1971).

government official; political scientist; diplomat

Personal Information

Born Ralph Johnson Bunche, August 7, 1904, in Detroit, MI; died December 9, 1971, in New York City; son of Fred (a barber) and Olive Agnes (a pianist; maiden name, Johnson) Bunche; married Ruth Ethel Harris, June 23, 1930; children: Joan Harris, Jane (deceased), Ralph Johnson.
Education: University of California at Los Angeles, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1927; Harvard University, M.A., 1928, Ph.D., 1934; postdoctoral work, Northwestern University, London School of Economics, and University of Capetown, 1936-38.

Career

Howard University, Washington, DC, instructor, 1928-29, assistant professor, 1929-33, associate professor of political science, 1933-38; founder of National Negro Congress, 1936; codirector of Institute of Race Relations, Swarthmore College, 1936; assistant to sociologist Gunnar Myrdal for preparation of race treatise An American Dilemma, 1938-40; Office of the Coordinator of Information (later Office of Strategic Services), Washington, DC, senior social science analyst in charge of research on Africa and the Far East, 1941-44, chief of Africa section, 1943-44; U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC, area specialist on Africa for Division of Political Studies, 1944-47; assistant secretary, U.S. delegation to Dumbarton Oaks conference, United Nations (UN) Conference on International Organization, 1945; adviser, U.S. delegation to UN General Assembly, 1946; director of UN Trusteeship Department, 1948-54; UN undersecretary, 1955, undersecretary for special political affairs, 1958-67, and undersecretary-general, 1967-71; UN mediator on Palestine, 1948-49, Egypt, 1956, the Congo, 1960, and Yemen, 1963.

Life's Work

With quiet dignity and a deep-rooted commitment to world peace, the late Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche ascended the ladder of government service to become the highest ranking black and American in the United Nations (UN), an international organization of more than 150 member nations that serves to monitor political activity and mediate disputes throughout the world. Bunche is credited with having used his disarming diplomatic skills to broker peace among warring factions that many observers believed would never even negotiate with each other.

Although he began his career as a scholar, garnering a string of notable academic firsts, Bunche's principal contribution to history lies in his pacifying heated political tempers in the Middle East, the Congo, Greece, and other hot spots around the world. In his later years, Bunche was criticized by some elements of the conservative right wing in the United States, and, more scathingly, by members of the militant wing of the black civil rights movement, who charged that he was an "Uncle Tom" more interested in serving his white superiors and resolving international conflicts than in addressing the plight of blacks in his own segregated backyard. He graciously answered this criticism by pointing to his history of commitment to civil rights and, on a broader level, by arguing that efforts made toward world peace would help the United States maintain peace at home as well.

Ralph Johnson Bunche's life was, in the eyes of many, the stuff of legend. He was born August 7, 1904, in Detroit, Michigan, the only son of Fred Bunche, an itinerant barber, and the former Olive Agnes Johnson, an amateur pianist. He was not, as has often been said, the grandson of a slave, but Bunche did grow up in a ghetto racked by poverty, a condition that he would rise above by virtue of his sharp mind.

In 1914, in the hope that dryer air and a warmer climate would improve Olive's tuberculosis, the Bunches moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. The ride to the southwestern United States provided young Ralph's first exposure to a Jim Crow train in which blacks were relegated to the cars carrying luggage.

Disease claimed his parents' lives when he was 12, and Bunche, along with his sister, moved to Los Angeles, California, where they were taken in and reared by their maternal grandmother, Lucy Johnson. She taught the importance of self-respect, integrity, and hard work, and Bunche excelled in his studies, emerging as the class valedictorian at Jefferson High School. He worked for a time as a carpet layer, and his boss offered to send him to the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study the chemistry of dyes. But his grandmother, wary of his being beholden to anybody, advised against the offer, and Bunche, with the help of an athletic scholarship, enrolled instead at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Studying for a degree in international relations, Bunche refined the worldview that his grandmother first had instilled in him, a perspective that was manifested in the optimism and goodwill with which he carried out his life. The New Yorker quoted a 1925 academic paper in which Bunche rejected the theory of philosopher Thomas Hobbes that human beings are naturally brutish, self-serving, egotistic animals. "It is true that man has these qualities in him, but I contend that these base characteristics are in part counteracted by good ones. I have a deep-set conviction that man must have an inherent notion of right and wrong, a fundamental moral structure and a simple sense of individual obligation, whether he be in a natural state or in society."

In 1927 Bunche graduated at the head of his class and in his commencement address urged his fellow graduates to dedicate their lives to human fellowship and peace. He earned a scholarship to pursue graduate studies at Harvard University in Massachusetts, and, lacking train fare and money for expenses, was given $1000 by a black women's social club convinced of his talent and potential. He received his master's degree in 1928 and traveled to western Africa to complete his dissertation on French colonial rule in Togoland (now Togo and Ghana) and Dahomey (now Benin). In 1934 Bunche became the first black American to receive a doctorate in political science.

Bunche helped establish the political science department at the all-black Howard University, became codirector of the Institute of Race Relations at Swarthmore College, and from 1936 to 1938, engaged in postdoctoral work in anthropology at Northwestern University, the London School of Economics, and the University of Capetown in South Africa. From 1938 to 1940, armed with an expertise in colonialism and field research, Bunche collaborated with the eminent Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal on An American Dilemma, a monumental study of race relations and prejudice in the United States. In one incident, while trying to gather comprehensive information on black-white relations in the deep South, Bunche and Myrdal were chased through Alabama by a mob of whites angered by questions about interracial sex.

During World War II, in which he could not serve because of a sports injury, Bunche launched his career of public service by joining the National Defense Program's Office of the Coordinator of Information (which later became the Office of Strategic Services). As senior analyst of Africa and the Far East, he studied colonial areas of possible strategic importance to the United States. He went on to become chief of the office's Africa section and subsequently worked at the U.S. State Department, where he participated in the initial conferences that laid the groundwork for the United Nations and wrote a section of the UN charter dealing with the administration of former colonies of countries defeated in the war. In 1946 Bunche was the only African American to serve on the U.S. delegation to the first General Assembly of the United Nations, and a little more than a year later he was hired by then-UN secretary-general Trygve Lie to serve as director of the Trusteeship Department. He rose to the position of undersecretary-general--the highest U.S. official at the United Nations--and would become the valued right-hand man of Lie, as well as of future UN heads Dag Hammarskjold and U Thant.

It was at the United Nations that Bunche found the perfect fit of his commitment to world peace, his belief that the good qualities of people can triumph over the bad, and his optimism that conflict, no matter how entrenched and bitter, can be resolved. "I have a number of very strong biases," a 1972 Ebony article quoted Bunche as having once said. "I have a deepseated bias against hate and intolerance. I have a bias against racial and religious bigotry. I have a bias against war, a bias for peace. I have a bias which leads me to believe in the essential goodness of my fellow man, which leads me to believe that no problem in human relations is ever insoluble. And I have a strong bias in favor of the United Nations and its ability to maintain a peaceful world."

Bunche's first major diplomatic challenge validated the hopes he had pinned on the United Nations. In 1948 Lie asked him to accompany United Nations-appointed mediator Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden to the Middle East in an effort to peacefully resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict over the birth of a Jewish state and the partitioning of Palestine. The UN mission in the Holy Land was perilous, as the conflict touched not only on political states and geographic borders, but on fundamental and divisive religious animosities. The cars in which the UN negotiators rode were often fired on by snipers, and one of the chauffeurs driving Bunche was killed.

When Bernadotte was assassinated by Israeli terrorists in late 1948, the UN Security Council entrusted Bunche with the task of brokering a peace. Recognizing that the factions refused to sit face to face at the negotiating table, Bunche worked night and day organizing and leading small committees that discussed particular points, lest they be distracted by the enormity of the problem as a whole. Marshaling a strong personality and an objectivity that demonstrated his fairness, Bunche earned the trust of both the Israelis and the Arabs and succeeded in negotiating a truce, then an armistice, and, in 1949, the end of the conflict.

Bunche was awarded the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize, the first black to be so honored, and brought new respect to the organization that he had long championed. A UN colleague was quoted as telling the New Yorker, "I've known him and worked with him since 1946, and his devotion to the UN--I must say, greatly to his own cost--has been single-minded. He's usually the first into a dangerous situation and the last out. He regards life with the calm and compassion of a selfless man devoted to a great task."

While most famous for the 1949 agreement, Bunche is said to have considered his proudest accomplishment his 1956 role in directing the 6000-man UN Emergency Forces that helped sustain peace for 11 years in Egypt when the Suez crisis seemed on the brink of a catastrophic war. "For the first time we have found a way to use military men for peace instead of war," Bunche was quoted in Time as having said.

Bunche's most difficult assignment, by his own admission, was keeping the peace in the Congo (now Zaire) in 1960, when Belgium granted independence to the African country and pulled out, leaving a vacuum of political leadership and skilled personnel. Bunche was called in to lead a 20,000-man UN force to prevent the collision of a leaderless military and a province threatening to secede. After two months of negotiations, Bunche successfully shaped a political environment in which the fledgling country of Zaire was afforded a promising, peaceful opportunity to survive.

Because of his commitment to peace and his successes in the art of diplomacy, Bunche was offered the position of assistant secretary of state in the administration of Harry Truman, then the highest U.S. post ever offered an African American. However, Bunche declined the offer, saying, according to Time, "It is well known that there is Jim Crow in Washington. It is equally well known that no Negro finds Jim Crow congenial. I am a Negro."

Ironically, Bunche was accused by some factions of trying to escape his race. As many whites proclaimed Bunche the quintessential successful black man, some militant civil rights activists charged that, in trotting around the globe to foster world peace, he had turned his back on the bitter struggle blacks were waging for equality in a segregated United States. But Bunche, who understood the personal and cultural impact of bigotry, answered that he had not only studied prejudice against blacks; more importantly, he had lived it. He walked his first picket for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1937, demonstrated with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 1963, and took part in the civil rights marches on Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, two years later.

Furthermore, Bunche argued during the Vietnam War that if the United States were serious about combating and eliminating racism, the government would take the funds and energy it was investing in Southeast Asia and channel them into a domestic war against the black ghettos. As a citizen of the world, he also saw for the troubled United States an educational example in the way former European colonies in Africa were beginning to stand on their own two feet. "They sit in the international councils on an equal basis with their former mother countries and rulers," he noted in Newsweek. "I have come to believe that what is good for the world is good for my country."

A more predictable source of criticism was the far right. For instance, the National Review, a conservative mouthpiece, editorialized in 1962 that Bunche was an unapologetic Marxist [advocate of the social and economic doctrine of nineteenth-century German intellectual Karl Marx, centering on the establishment of a classless society and common ownership of production] and had told "bald lies" concerning the United Nations' involvement in the Congo. "It had been our intention to leave Dr. Bunche alone, having dismissed him as, essentially, a UN mercenary, a man with an undistinguished mind and rather bad personal manners," the magazine said. "It becomes necessary under the circumstances ... to go on just a little bit further, and say that Mr. Bunche's judgment is very poor indeed, and that this should be kept in mind in evaluating his assessments of the tangled affairs of our disintegrating world."

Bunche, whom President Lyndon Johnson had beseeched not to resign from the UN in 1966, remained undersecretary-general until just before his death in 1971. He always maintained that his diplomatic successes were a testimony to the vision behind the United Nations and argued that persisting, seemingly insoluble crises, such as that in the Middle East, would be more productively addressed by negotiation rather than by war.

Echoing the thoughts of many world leaders, former British UN ambassador Lord Caradon was quoted as saying in Newsweek, "Of all the people I have worked with in my life, there is no one I respect more. He has always been my great hero. He represents everything I admire in international affairs and public life. Of all his great qualities--and he had so many--the one that I would choose is that of determined optimism. Never did he give up. Never did he despair. He is certainly one the great Americans."

Awards

Spingarn Medal, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1949; Nobel Peace Prize, 1950; Theodore Roosevelt Association Medal of Honor, 1954; Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award and Presidential Medal of Freedom, both 1963; inducted into African American Hall of Fame, 1991.

Works

Writings

• A World View of Race, Association of Negro Folk Education, 1936.
• Peace and the United Nations, Leeds University, 1952.
• The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR (interviews), University of Chicago Press, 1973.
• An African American in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche, 28 September 1937-1 January 1938, edited by Robert R. Edgar, Swallow, 1992.

Further Reading

Books

• Cornell, Jean G., Ralph Bunche: Champion of Peace, Garrard, 1976.
• Jakoubek, Robert, Ralph Bunche, Chelsea House, 1989.
• Kugelmass, J. Alvin, Ralph J. Bunche: Fighter for Peace, Messner, 1962.
• Mann, Peggy, Ralph Bunche: UN Peacemaker, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1975.

• Christian Century, December 29, 1971.
• Ebony, February 1972; September 1992.
• Holiday, April 1970.
• Nation, December 17, 1971.
• National Review, May 22, 1962.
• Newsweek, October 11, 1971; December 20, 1971.
• New Yorker, January 1, 1972.
• New York Times, December 10, 1971.
• Time, December 20, 1971.

— Isaac Rosen

(click to enlarge)
Ralph Bunche. (credit: H. Roger-Viollet)

(born Aug. 7, 1904, Detroit, Mich., U.S. — died Dec. 9, 1971, New York, N.Y.) U.S. diplomat. He earned graduate degrees at Harvard University and taught at Howard University from 1928. After studying colonial policy in Africa, he collaborated with Gunnar Myrdal in An American Dilemma (1944), a study of U.S. race relations. He worked in the U.S. war and state departments during World War II. In 1947 he became director of the trusteeship department of the UN Secretariat. His work in forging a truce between Palestinian Arabs and Jews earned him the 1950 Nobel Prize for Peace. As UN undersecretary for political affairs, he oversaw UN peacekeeping forces around the Suez Canal (1956), in the Congo (1960), and in Cyprus (1964). He also served on the board of the NAACP for 22 years.

For more information on Ralph Johnson Bunche, visit Britannica.com.

(1904-1971), scholar, statesman, and U.N. under secretary general. Bunche was the first black person to win the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in 1950. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Bunche and his sister were orphaned in 1915 and were reared by their grandmother in Los Angeles.

A brilliant, industrious student, Bunche graduated from Jefferson High School in 1922 as class valedictorian but was barred from the honor society because of his race. He would be reminded of this insult years later when the West Side Tennis Club in New York denied membership to him and his son. After he lodged a complaint, the club relented because of his international prominence. He refused to join the club, however, because its exception was based on his personal prestige rather than on the principle of racial equality. Bunche noted that "no Negro American can be free from the disabilities of race . . . until the lowliest Negro ... is no longer disadvantaged because of his race."

In 1927 Bunche graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles, where he had excelled both in and outside the classroom. He wrote for the school newspaper, won oratorical contests, was sports editor of the yearbook, played guard for three years on the basketball team, and became Phi Beta Kappa. He then entered Harvard University, where in 1934 he became the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. in government and international relations. While completing his doctoral studies, Bunche joined the faculty at Howard University, where he established and chaired the political science department and served as special assistant to Howard's president. He organized the Joint Committee on National Recovery to lobby Congress for black participation in New Deal programs and to fight against racial discrimination in New Deal agencies. He also helped form the National Negro Congress to arouse blacks to work for social and economic progress and to unite black and white workers.

For Bunche, the so-called Negro problem in America was rooted more in economic and class conflict than in racial antagonism. He was one of Gunnar Myrdal's six staff members for the study of race relations that resulted in the monumental two-volume An American Dilemma in 1944. Bunche wrote extensive memoranda on black politics, organizations, leadership, and ideology for the study.

After the United States entered World War II, Bunche took a leave of absence from Howard and joined the Office of Strategic Services as senior social scientist for research on Africa and other colonial areas. Given his doctoral research on colonial administration, he was the foremost American authority on colonialism in Africa. In 1944, he moved to the State Department, where he supplied advice on dependent territories for U.S. representatives to the Dumbarton Oaks Conference and the meetings that established the United Nations. Bunche helped draft the trusteeship provisions of the U.N. Charter and assisted in organizing the Division of Trusteeship at the United Nations, becoming its director in 1947.

That same year, he became secretary to the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine and acting mediator in 1948 after the assassination of the first mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden. Bunche earned high praise from all quarters for his deft handling of the armistice negotiations that ended the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1949 and won him his Nobel Peace Prize. He became the U.N. under secretary general in 1955 and directed U.N. peacekeeping missions in the Suez in 1956, in the Congo in 1960, and in Cyprus in 1964.

An indefatigable advocate of human rights at home and peace abroad, Bunche was given the naacp's Spingarn Medal, its highest honor, in 1949. He served on the naacp's board of directors for twenty-two years. In 1937, he walked his first picket line for civil rights in Washington, D.C.; he later participated in the 1963 March on Washington and in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. In 1953, the American Political Science Association elected him president in recognition of his scholarship and mediation of international conflict, and President John F. Kennedy, in 1963, bestowed upon him the nation's highest civilian award, the Medal of Freedom.

Bibliography:

Robert L. Harris, Jr., "Ralph J. Bunche and Afro-American Participation in Decolonization," in Robert A. Hill, ed., Pan-African Biography (1987); Peggy Mann, Ralph J. Bunche: UN Peacemaker (1975).

Author:

Robert L. Harris, Jr.

See also American Dilemma, An; Marches on Washington: 1941, 1963; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Racial Desegregation.

1903 - 1971

U.S. diplomat.

Ralph Bunche was born in Detroit, Michigan. His father was an itinerant barber. Orphaned at eleven, he was brought up by his grandmother in the Watts district of Los Angeles. Success at school both as student and athlete took him to the University of California, Los Angeles and, as a graduate student, to Harvard University. Colonialism was the subject of his Harvard doctoral thesis, and he did field work in Cameroon, French Togo, South Africa, Kenya, and Congo.

His writings on the race problem in the United States are part of the earliest literature of the Civil Rights movement. In A World View of Race (1936) he made a spirited connection between the nature and causes of the race problem in United States and of the international phenomenon of colonialism. In 1935, with A. Philip Randolph, he founded the National Negro Congress to give a voice to wider spectrum of the black population. He was chief assistant and researcher to Gunnar Myrdal in writing the classic An Ameran Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, eventually published in 1944.

During World War II Bunche worked in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In 1944 he moved to the State Department and was its first black official. There, and at the 1945 San Francisco Conference, he was the principal drafter of Chapters XI (Non-self-governing Territories) and XII (The International Trusteeship System) of the United Nations Charter.

In 1946 Bunche set up the Trusteeship Division of the United Nations Secretariat. In 1947 in Palestine, he wrote both the majority (partition) proposal and the minority (federation) proposal of the UN Special Committee on Palestine. In 1948, as chief assistant to the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, he set up the UN Truce Supervision Organization in Palestine. When Bernadotte was assassinated in Jerusalem by the Stern Gang in September 1948, Bunche took over as mediator and negotiated armistice agreements between Israel and its four Arab neighbors. For this feat he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. From 1953, as Under Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs, Bunche was the chief political adviser to Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, and to Hammarskjöld's successor, U Thant. During the Suez Crisis in 1956, he set up the first UN peacekeeping force, the United Nations Emergency Force in Middle East (UNEF I) and organized and directed subsequent peacekeeping forces in Lebanon, the Congo, and Cyprus. He personally led the largest of these, in the Congo, in 1960.

Bunche's complete integrity and fair-mindedness were universally acknowledged and respected, and his intellectual grasp, ingenuity, and determination as a negotiator were widely admired. He turned down efforts by successive U.S. presidents to woo him away from the United Nations. At his death in 1971, U Thant hailed him as "an international institution in his own right."

Bibliography

Henry, Charles P., ed. Ralph J. Bunche: Selected Speeches andWritings. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Rivlin, Benjamin, ed. Ralph Bunche: The Man and His Times. New York: Holmes and Meir, 1990.

Urquhart, Brian. Ralph Bunche: An American Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.

— BRIAN URQUHART

An African-American diplomat and prominent official of the United Nations, Bunche won the Nobel Prize for peace in 1950 for negotiating an armistice between Israelis and Arabs.

Quotes:

"If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up in a person."

"The United Nations is our one great hope for a peaceful and free world."

Ralph Bunche
Ralph Bunche at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Born	August 7, 1903(1903-08-07) Detroit, Michigan
Died	December 9, 1971 (aged 68)
Occupation	Political scientist and diplomat
Known for	Mediation in Palestine, Nobel Peace Prize recipient

Ralph Johnson Bunche (August 7, 1903^[1] – December 9, 1971) was an American political scientist and diplomat who received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his late 1940s mediation in Palestine. He was the first person of color to be so honored in the history of the Prize.^[2] He was involved in formation and administration of the United Nations. In 1963, he received the Medal of Freedom from President John F. Kennedy.^[3]

Contents 1 Early life and education 2 Career 3 World War II years 4 Work with the United Nations 4.1 Arab-Israeli conflict and Nobel Peace Prize 5 Prominent African American 6 Honors 7 Quotes 8 Selected bibliography by Bunche 9 See also 10 References 10.1 Bibliography 11 External links

Early life and education

Bunche's childhood home in South Los Angeles.

Bunche was born in Detroit, Michigan to an African American family; his father was a barber, his mother an amateur musician. His father had ancestors who were free before the American Revolution. They moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, when he was a child to improve his parents' health. His parents died soon after, and he was raised in Los Angeles by his grandmother.

Bunche was a brilliant student, a debater, and the valedictorian of his graduating class at Jefferson High School. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles and graduated summa cum laude in 1927, again as the valedictorian of his class. Using the money his community raised for his studies, and a scholarship from the University, he studied at Harvard University. There he earned a master's degree in political science in 1928 and a doctorate in 1934, when he was already teaching in Howard University's Department of Political Science. It was typical then for doctoral candidates to start teaching before completion of their dissertations. He was the first black American to gain a PhD in political science from an American university. From 1936 to 1938, Ralph Bunche conducted postdoctoral research in anthropology at London School of Economics (LSE), and later at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Career

Bunche chaired the Department of Political Science at Howard University from 1928 until 1950, where he taught generations of students. He lived in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington, D.C., and was a member of the American Federation of Teachers affiliate at Harvard.

"Throughout his career, Bunche has maintained strong ties with education. He chaired the Department of Political Science at Howard University from 1928 until 1950; taught at Harvard University from 1950 to 1952; served as a member of the New York City Board of Education (1958-1964), as a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University (1960-1965), as a member of the Board of the Institute of International Education, and as a trustee of Oberlin College, Lincoln University, and New Lincoln School."^[4]

In 1936 Bunche authored a pamphlet entitled A World View of Race. In it Bunche wrote: "And so class will some day supplant race in world affairs. Race war will then be merely a side-show to the gigantic class war which will be waged in the big tent we call the world." In 1936-40 Bunche served as contributing editor of the journal Science and Society: A Marxian Quarterly.^[5]

World War II years

Bunche spent time during World War II in the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor of the CIA) as senior social analyst on Colonial Affairs before joining the State Department. In 1943 Bunche went to the State Department, where he was appointed Associate Chief of the division of Dependent Area Affairs under Alger Hiss. With Hiss, Bunche became one of the leaders of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR).

He participated in the preliminary planning for the United Nations at the San Francisco Conference of 1945.

Work with the United Nations

At the close of the Second World War, Bunche was active in preliminary planning for the United Nations (Dumbarton Oaks Conversations held in Washington D.C. in 1944). He was also an adviser to the U.S. delegation for the "Charter Conference" of the United Nations held in 1945. Additionally, he was closely involved in drafting the charter of the United Nations. Ralph Bunche along with Eleanor Roosevelt were considered instrumental in the creation and adoption of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.

According to the United Nations document "Ralph Bunche: Visionary for Peace", during his 25 years of service to the United Nations, he

...championed the principle of equal rights for everyone, regardless of race or creed. He believed in "the essential goodness of all people, and that no problem in human relations is insoluble." Through the UN Trusteeship Council, Bunche readied the international stage for an unprecedented period of transformation, dismantling the old colonial systems in Africa and Asia, and guiding scores of emerging nations through the transition to independence in the post-war era.

Arab-Israeli conflict and Nobel Peace Prize

Beginning in 1947, Bunche was involved with the Arab-Israeli conflict. He served as assistant to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, and thereafter as the principal secretary of the U.N. Palestine Commission. In 1948 he traveled to the Middle East as the chief aide to Sweden's Count Folke Bernadotte, who had been appointed by the U.N. to mediate the conflict. These men chose the island of Rhodes for their base and working headquarters. In September, Bernadotte was assassinated in Jerusalem by members of the underground Jewish group Lehi.

Following the assassination, Dr. Bunche became the U.N.'s chief mediator and chose to conduct all future negotiations on Rhodes. The representative for Israel was Moshe Dayan who reported in memoirs that much of his delicate negotiation with Ralph Bunche was conducted over a billiard table while shooting pool with him. Optimistically, Dr. Bunche commissioned a local potter to create unique memorial plates bearing the name of each negotiator. When the agreement was signed, Dr. Bunche awarded these gifts. After unwrapping his, Moshe Dayan asked Ralph Bunche what might have happened if no agreement had been reached. "I'd have broken the plates over your damn heads", Bunche answered. For achieving the 1949 Armistice Agreements, Dr. Bunche received the Peace Prize ^[6], in 1950.^[7] He continued to work for the United Nations, mediating in other strife-torn regions, including the Congo, Yemen, Kashmir, and Cyprus. He rose to the position of undersecretary-general in 1968

Prominent African American

The grave of Ralph Bunche

As a prominent African American, Bunche was an active and vocal supporter of the civil rights movement, and participated in the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, and also in the famous Selma to Montgomery, Alabama march that led to the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.^[8]

Bunche was a resident of the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens, New York.^[9]

Bunche died in 1971 and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. He was 68.

Honors

A bust of Ralph Bunche, Bunche Hall, UCLA.

In 1951 Bunche was awarded the Silver Buffalo Award by the National Boy Scouts of America for his work in scouting and positive impact for the world.

On January 12, 1982, The United States Postal Service (USPS) issued a postage stamp in memory of Dr. Bunche. A bust of Ralph Bunche, at the entrance to Bunche Hall, overlooks the Sculpture Garden at UCLA.

The Ralph J. Bunche Library of the U.S. Department of State is the oldest Federal government library. It was founded by the first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson in 1789. It was dedicated to and renamed the Ralph J. Bunche Library on May 5, 1997. It is located in the Harry S. Truman Building, the main State Department headquarters.

In 1996, Howard University named its international affairs center, a physical facility and associated administrative programs, the Ralph J. Bunche International Affairs Center. The Center is the site of lectures and internationally-oriented programming as well as serving as "Howard's point of contact for . . . foreign embassies, governments, univer­sities and corporations, as well as U.S. government agencies."^[10]

Ralph Bunche Park is in New York City, across First Avenue from the United Nations headquarters. The neighborhood of Bunche Park in the city of Miami Gardens Florida, was named in honor of Mr. Bunche. Ralph J. Bunche also had elementary schools named after him in Ecorse, Michigan; Canton, Georgia; Miami, Florida; and New York City and a high school named after him in King George County, Virginia. One of the historic black beaches in Florida, from the age of segregation, is Bunche Beach, near Ft. Myers.

The Dr. Ralph J. Bunche Peace and Heritage Center, his boyhood home with his grandmother in the Central Avenue Neighborhood of Los Angeles, has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places and City of Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Landmarks. The owner of the property, Dunbar Economic Development Corporation of Los Angeles, operates the home as a rehabilitated interpretive Museum and Community Center to promote peaceful interaction of all groups within South Central Los Angeles. The period of significance of the historic house museum is from the 1920s. The property was fully restored between 2002 and 2004, winning a Los Angeles Conservancy Award for Historic Preservation in 2006. Design Aid Architects was the Historic Preservation Consultant for the property rehabilitation.

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Ralph Bunche on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.^[11]

In 2004, Ralph Bunche was posthumously honored with the William J. Donovan Award from The OSS Society.

Quotes

• "May there be, in our time, at long last, a world at peace in which we, the people, may for once begin to make full use of the great good that is in us."^[3]
• "There are no warlike peoples - just warlike leaders."^[12]
• "I...believe in the essential goodness of my fellow man, which leads me to believe that no problem of human relations is ever insoluble."^[7]

Selected bibliography by Bunche

• Bunche, Ralph, A World View of Race. (Bronze Booklet Series. Washington, D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936) [Reprint, Port Washington, NY, Kennikat Press, 1968; excerpt in Ralph Bunche: Selected Speeches and Writings, edited by Charles P. Henry]

• Bunche, Ralph. The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, edited with an Introduction by Dewey W. Grantham. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973) [A version of a Ralph Bunche 1941 research memorandum prepared for the Carnegie-Myrdal Study, "The Negro in America"]

• Bunche, Ralph. A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership, edited with an Introduction by Jonathan Scott Holloway (NY, New York University Press, 2005) [A version of "The Negro in America"]

• Edgar, Robert R., ed. An African American in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche, 28 September 1937 - 1 January 1938. (Athens, Ohio University Press, 1992)

• Henry, Charles P., ed. Ralph J. Bunche: Selected Speeches and Writings. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995)

See also

• List of African American firsts
• Black Nobel Prize laureates

References

1. ^ Urquhart, p. 25
2. ^ Ralph Bunche, PBS.
3. ^ ^{a b} Ralph Bunche, Medal of Freedom
4. ^ Bunche Biography, Nobel Peace Prize website.
5. ^ Federal Bureau of Investigation Report: Institute of Pacific Relations, Internal Security - C, November 4, 1944, p. 4, FBI IPR file, Section 1, PDF p. 43
6. ^ Ralph Bunche: UN Mediator in the Middle East, 1948-1949
7. ^ ^{a b} Benjamin Rivlin, "Vita: Ralph Johnson Bunche: Brief life of a champion of human dignity: 1903-1971", Harvard Magazine, Nov. 2003.
8. ^ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Dr. Ralph J. Bunche: Nobel Peace Prize Winners Whose Paths Converge
9. ^ Rimer, Sara. "From Queens Streets, City Hall Seems Very Distant", The New York Times, October 19, 1989. Accessed November 13, 2007.
10. ^ http://www.howard.edu/rjb/ABOUT.HTM
11. ^ Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.
12. ^ Forbes, Dec. 7, 2007

Bibliography

• Henry, Charles P. Ralph Bunche: Model Negro or American Other? (NY, New York University Press, 1999)
• Meyer, Edith Patterson In Search of Peace: The Winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, 1901 - 1975 (Nashville, Abdington, 1978)
• Rivlin, Benjamin, ed. Ralph Bunche: The Man and His Times (New York: Holmes & Meyer, 1990)
• Urquhart, Brian. Ralph Bunche: An American Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993) [Paperback edition titled Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey, 1998]
• Nobel Committee information on Bunche
• Ralph Bunche Biography

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ralph Bunche

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ralph Bunche

• Ralph Bunche at Find a Grave
• 1927 Yearbook Photo

Preceded by Position Created

Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations for Special Political Affairs 1961 – 1971

Succeeded by Brian Urquhart

v • d • e Nobel Peace Prize laureates Aristide Briand / Gustav Stresemann / Austen Chamberlain (1926) · Ferdinand Buisson / Ludwig Quidde (1927) · Frank B. Kellogg (1929) · Nathan Söderblom (1930) · Jane Addams / Nicholas Butler (1931) · Norman Angell (1933) · Arthur Henderson (1934) · Carl von Ossietzky (1935) · Carlos Saavedra Lamas (1936) · Robert Cecil (1937) · Nansen International Office for Refugees (1938) · International Committee of the Red Cross (1944) · Cordell Hull (1945) · Emily Balch / John Mott (1946) · Friends Service Council / American Friends Service Committee (1947) · John Boyd Orr (1949) · Ralph Bunche (1950) Complete roster · 1901–1925 · 1926–1950 · 1951–1975 · 1976–2000 · 2001–present

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