Ralph Bunche

Ralph Johnson Bunche was born in Detroit, Michigan, on the seventh of August 1904. He was orphaned at twelve and raised by his grandmother in Los Angeles. He graduated summa cum laude from UCLA in 1927, took a doctorate in political science from Harvard in 1934 — the first African American to earn a PhD in political science from any American university — on French colonial administration in Togoland and Dahomey.

He served as the lead American negotiator at the conferences that produced the United Nations Charter at San Francisco in 1945. From 1946 until his death he held progressively senior positions at the United Nations Secretariat, becoming Under-Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs — the highest position any American had held at the UN.

His most consequential work came in 1948 and 1949 as the chief UN mediator in the Arab-Israeli War. He flew from one capital to another for eleven months, drafting and redrafting the armistice agreement that ended the war. The four armistice agreements he produced — signed at Rhodes — held the fragile peace in the Middle East for the next two decades.

He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 — the first African American to receive the Nobel in any category. He had been forty-six years old.

He continued at the United Nations through the Congo crisis of 1960 to 1964 (where he served as Dag Hammarskjöld's principal political adviser), the Cyprus dispute of 1964, and the Yemen War of 1962 to 1965. He held the trust of every UN Secretary-General from Trygve Lie through U Thant.

He died in New York on the ninth of December 1971, age sixty-seven.

He is honored here as the diplomat who held the Middle East's first armistice together, and the first African American Nobel laureate.