Ralph Bunche

Ralph Johnson Bunche was born in Detroit, Michigan, on the seventh of August 1904. Orphaned in his youth after his mother and uncle died in 1917, he was raised in Los Angeles by his maternal grandmother, Lucy Taylor Johnson, whose fortitude he honored all his life. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1927, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and valedictorian of his class, then earned a doctorate in political science from Harvard University in 1934 — the first African American to attain such a degree in the field.

A scholar before he was a statesman, Bunche taught at Howard University and helped shape the study of colonial administration and race. His research carried him across Africa, and his dissertation on French rule in Togoland and Dahomey won Harvard's Toppan Prize. This grounding in the questions of empire and self-determination would guide the decolonization work of his later years.

Drawn into the founding of the United Nations, Bunche became one of its principal architects and its steadiest hand in crisis. As acting mediator in Palestine after the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, he negotiated the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors. For this achievement he received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first African American and the first person of color to be so honored.

He served the United Nations for the rest of his life, guiding peacekeeping efforts from the Sinai to the Congo, Cyprus, and Yemen, and rising to Under-Secretary-General. He died in New York City on the ninth of December 1971. A man of quiet resolve who called himself an incurable optimist for peace, Ralph Bunche stands honored as one who bent the arc of a fractured century toward reconciliation.