Ralph Bunche
by Mary-Ossei Anto

The name of Ralph Bunche is unfamiliar in too many textbooks.
He is a hero of world peace and, in actuality, devised and implemented
the mediation principles that now govern all UN peacekeeping efforts.

Born in 1903 into a poor, black family in Detroit, Michigan, Ralph Bunche became an ambitious individual, a scholar on racism, a skilled diplomat and tireless peacemaker and humanitarian. He co-authored an important book on racism, fought against all forms of hatred, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. He was Undersecretary-General of the United Nations; negotiated four peace agreements that ended the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli War; and was responsible for the first UN program on peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Indeed, Ralph Bunche was a man who rose from modest circumstances to become the foremost international mediator and peacekeeper of his time. This is his inspiring story.

In Youth, a Free Yet Studious Mind
Ralph Bunch's grandmother, his Nana, taught him when he was a child to be proud of being black, to stand up for his beliefs in himself, and to oppose the prejudices of the world. It was his Nana who encouraged the young Bunche to pursue scholarship, through which he learned about the injustices of the world.

As a young man, Bunche had a free yet studious mind -- free because he often dreamed of accomplishing what others thought impossible, and studious because he worked hard to graduate as valedictorian both of his high school and of University of California at Los Angeles, where he earned a bachelor's degree. Later, he joined thirty to forty other black students at Harvard University where he earned a Ph.D in political science -- an area that directed his interest to the decolonization of the old colonial empires.

Realizing the Intensity and Examining the Nature of Racism
In 1928, Bunche became a member of the faculty at Howard University in Washington DC, a predominantly black university founded in 1869, where he defended activist students who had been threatened by the school administration for picketing segregated restaurants or for participating in demonstrations that had turned into riots. It was at Howard University that Bunche met the woman who was to become his wife, a student named Ruth Ethel Harris. Before they were married, Bunche returned to Harvard University to complete his preliminary coursework for a doctorate degree. Years later, Ralph Bunche became the first African-American to hold a desk-level position in the US State Department, a position that was first refused to him on the basis of prejudice. While at Harvard University his eyes were opened to the intensity of racism that existed around him. He realized that in order to be recognized, he needed to prove that he was, in the academic sense, smarter than his white classmates. The workload for Bunche during this time was so grueling that by his wedding date, he had become addicted to cigarettes, a habit he didn't shake off until twenty years later.

Bunche left for France and Africa in 1931 intending to study colonialism, discuss his findings with officials of the League of Nations, and gather information for his doctoral dissertation. In France he was shocked by the racism that existed there; and in Africa he was dismayed by the overwhelming poverty. In 1937 during a visit to South Africa, Bunche interactions with the blacks got him in trouble with British officials with whom he had become acquainted. He realized then that European racism was as deep-rooted as American racism.

Bunche returned to the United States and directed his scholarly efforts to racism, writing that racism "stem[s] from the wider failure to improve the standard living conditions of the working class…much of black racial ideology [is] simply a reaction to white racist assumptions and practices and to the biases of the dominant white culture…"

In 1944, Bunche and Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal produced a monumental study named An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy which discussed Black Americans, White Americans, and racism, particularly in the United States. This study became "the largest and most comprehensive investigation of race relations in the United States that had ever been attempted." By this time, Bunche had aged to forty-one years.

International Peacekeeping Efforts
When Nazism led to the Second World War, Bunche wrote continuously about his opinion that the United States should enter the war. On September 10, 1941, two months before the Pearl Harbor bombing and the United States' entry into the war, Bunche was appointed Senior Social Science Analyst in the Library of Congress, where his job was to focus on the entire British Empire – an area with which he had been familiarized by his studies. He combined his tasks with topics dealing with the role of the Black American in the war effort and presented outlines, journals, and studies of his thoughts and suggestions, many of which were put into practice.

After the World War II, Bunche was appointed a member of the United Nation Secretariat through which he became very involved in the fight to end the struggle between the Arabs and the Jews of Palestine. A Jewish homeland was established in Palestine after World War I. Tensions between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine were already tense, but when Hitler’s hatred of Jews sent many more of them fleeing into Palestine, the Arabic hostility for the Jews increased. Great Britain, the mandate power for Palestine was too strained from the war to get involved. And so Bunche, with much success, developed the UN Partition Plan which greatly resolved the Jew-Arab tensions in Palestine. The following year, Bunche became successor to the Swedish Ambassador and was named UN mediator. With this post, he ended the first Arab-Israeli war by negotiating armistice agreements between the two sides. His accomplishment won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. However, he felt that the recognition was in honor of him simply doing his job and thus refused to accept it until he was urged to do so by the first UN Secretary General, Trygve Lie.

Over the course of the following twenty years, Bunche worked with an astonishing number of recognized individuals such as Gamal Abdal Nasser, Dean Rusk, John F. Kennedy, Dag Hammarskjold, U Thant, Lyndon Johnson, and Jawaharlal Nehru, just to name a few. He also partook, at great personal risk, in efforts to end the bloody conflicts happening in both the international and civic realms. Later, in order to defuse the Suez Canal Crisis, he "built up the first UN peacekeeping force – a major development in international relations – and he devised and implemented the principles that came to govern all subsequent UN peacekeeping efforts."

Participation in the US Civil Rights Movement
Although the pressures of working for the UN took toll on his health, Bunche remained active domestically – speaking out about the role of injustice in the creation and existence of the American inner-city ghettos and partaking actively in the American civil rights movement. As a matter of fact, he was a close associate of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Bunche regularly gave speeches advocating the intensification of black demonstrations. Although his speeches led to several threats on his life by adversaries, Bunche did not back down, following the principles taught to him by his grandmother. He served for twenty-two years on the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Shuttling Between Hospital and United Nations Headquarters
In the early 1970s, Bunche’s health began keeping him from his full-time office tasks. He grew blind and suffered from progressive kidney failure. Attending UN conferences became extremely painful for him, although his advice and comments were still respectfully commanded. As his illnesses worsened, the New York Hospital became like his second home; yet everyone knew that he did not have long to live. At 12:40am on December 9, 1971 in New York Hospital, Ralph Bunche died a peaceful death. His funeral seated a packed congregation which included many widely-recognized individuals, two of whom served as eulogists - U Thant and Roy Wilkins. Ralph Bunche was buried in the family plot in Bronx, NY.

Mary Ossei-Anto is a student at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York