Bunche, Ralph

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Bunche, Ralph

August 7, 1904
December 9, 1971

Ralph Johnson Bunche, a scholar, diplomat, and international civil servant, was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Fred and Olive Johnson Bunch. His father, a barber, abandoned the family when his son was young. Bunche moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his mother, who died there in 1917. He then went to Los Angeles to be raised by his maternal grandmother, Lucy Taylor Jackson. During his teen years, he added a final "e" to his name to make it more distinguished. Bunche lived in a neighborhood with relatively few blacks, and he was one of only two blacks in his class at Jefferson High School, where he graduated first in his class, although Los Angeles school authorities barred him from the all-city honor roll because of his race. Bunche's valedictory address was his first public speech. Bunche entered the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) on a scholarship, majoring in political science

and philosophy. He was active on the debating team, wrestled, played football and baseball, and was a standout basketball player. In 1927 he graduated summa cum laude and, again, first in his class.

Assisted by a tuition fellowship and a $1,000 scholarship provided by a group of African-American women in Los Angeles, Bunche enrolled at Harvard University in 1927 to pursue graduate study in political science. He received a master's degree in 1928 and then accepted an invitation to join the faculty of Howard University. Bunche was only twenty-five when he created and chaired Howard's political science department. His association with Howard continued until 1941, although he also pursued graduate work at Harvard during this period.

Bunche's graduate work combined his interest in government with a developing interest in Africa. He conducted field research in western Africa in 1932 and 1933, and he wrote a dissertation on the contrast between European colonial and mandatory governments in Africa. The dissertation, completed in 1934, won a Harvard award as the best political science dissertation of the year, and Bunche was awarded the first Ph.D. in political science ever granted to an African American by an American university. Bunche undertook postdoctoral studies in 1936 and 1937, first at Northwestern University, then at the London School of Economics and at South Africa's University of Cape Town. In 1936 he published a pamphlet, A World View of Race. His notes, taken during fieldwork in South Africa and detailing the political and racial situation, were published in 1992 under the title An African American in South Africa.

During Bunche's time at Howard in the 1930s, he was deeply involved in civil rights questions. He believed that black people's principal concerns were economic, and that race, though significant, was secondary. While he participated in civil rights actions—notably a protest he organized against segregation in Washington's National Theater in 1931—Bunche, a principled integrationist, warned that civil rights efforts founded on race would collapse over economic issues. He felt that the best hope for black progress lay in interracial working-class economic improvement, and he criticized Franklin Roosevelt both for his inattention to the needs of black people and for the New Deal's failure to attack existing political and economic structures. In 1936 Bunche and others founded the National Negro Congress, a broad-based coalition he later termed "the first sincere effort to bring together on an equal plane Negro leaders [and] professional and white-collar workers with the Negro manual workers and their leaders and organizers." The Congress was eventually taken over by Communist Party workers. Bunche, disillusioned, resigned in 1938.

In 1939, Bunche was hired by the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal to work on what would become the classic study of race relations in the United States, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). Over the next two years Bunche wrote four long research memos for the project (one was published in 1973, after Bunche's death, as The Negro in the Age of FDR ). The final report incorporated much of Bunche's research and thought. The unpublished memos, written for the Carnegie Corporation, have remained an important scholarly resource for researchers on black America, both for their exhaustive data and for Bunche's incisive conclusions.

In 1941, after the United States entered World War II, Bunche left Howard to work for the Office of the Coordinator of Information for the Armed Service, and he later joined the newly formed Office of Strategic Services, the chief American intelligence organization during World War II and a precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency. Bunche headed the Africa section of the Research and Analysis Branch. In 1944 Bunche joined the U.S. State Department's Postwar Planning Unit to deal with the future of colonial territories.

From this point forward, Bunche operated in the arena of international political affairs with an everincreasing degree of policymaking power. In 1945 he was appointed to the Division of Dependent Area Affairs in the Office of Special Political Affairs, becoming in the process the first African American to head a State Department "desk."

In 1944 Bunche was a member of the U.S. delegation at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington, D.C., which laid the foundation for the United Nations. Appointed to the U.S. delegation in San Francisco in 1945 and in London in 1946, Bunche helped set up the UN Trusteeship system to prepare colonies for independence. His draft declaration of principles governing all dependent territories was the basis of Chapter XI, "Declaration Regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories," of the United Nations Charter.

Bunche went to work in the United Nations Secretariat in 1946 as head of the Trusteeship Department. In 1947 he was assigned to the UN Special Commission on Palestine which was a United Nations Trusteeship. The out-break of the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948, and the assassination of UN mediator Folke Bernadotte by Jewish militants, propelled Bunche, Bernadotte's assistant, into the position of acting mediator. Bunche brought the two sides together, negotiating with each in turn, and succeeded in arranging an armistice. Bunche's actions earned him the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize. He was the first United Nations figure, as well as the first African American, to win a Nobel Prize. Bunche also won the NAACP's Spingarn Medal (1950), and other honors. In 1953 the American Political Science Association elected him its president, the first time an African American was so honored. In 1950, President Truman offered him the post of assistant secretary of state. Bunche declined it, and in a rare personal statement on racism, explained that he did not wish to raise his family in Washington, a segregated city.

Bunche remained at the United Nations until shortly before his death in 1971. In 1954 he was appointed United Nations Undersecretary General for Special Political Affairs, and served as a roving specialist in UN work. Bunche's most significant contribution at the United Nations was his role in designing and setting up UN peacekeeping forces, which supervise and enforce truces and armistices and have arguably been the UN's most important contribution to global peace. Building on the truce supervising operation he put into place after the 1949 Middle East armistice, Bunche created a United Nations Emergency Force in 1956, after the Suez crisis. UN peacekeepers played a major role in Lebanon and Yemen, and later in the Congo (now Zaire), in India and Pakistan, and in Cyprus. Sir Brian Urquhart, Bunche's assistant and successor as UN Undersecretary General for Special Political Affairs, said: "Bunche was unquestionably the original principal architect of [what] is now called peacekeeping … and he remained the principal architect, coordinator, and director of United Nations peacekeeping operations until the end of his career at the UN."

While Bunche remained primarily involved as an international civil servant with the United Nations, promoting international peace and aiding developing countries, he also remained interested in the civil rights struggle in America. Indeed, Bunche demanded and received special dispensation from the United Nations to speak out on racial issues in the United States. Bunche served on the board of the NAACP for many years, and he served as an informal adviser to civil rights leaders. In 1963 he attended the March on Washington, and two years later, despite poor health, he traveled to Alabama and walked with the Reverend. Martin Luther King Jr. in the front row of the Selma-to-Montgomery Voting Rights March.

Bibliography

Bunche, Ralph. "A Critical Analysis of the Tactics and Programs of Minority Groups." In Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century, edited by August Meier, Elliot Rudwick, and Francis L. Broderick. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971. (Originally published in the Journal of Negro Education in July 1935.)

Bunche, Ralph. An African-American in South Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992.

Mann, Peggy. Ralph Bunche, UN Peacemaker. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1975.

Rivlin, Benjamin, ed. Ralph Bunche: The Man and His Times. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988.

c. gerald fraser (1996)

Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History