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"If you want to get an idea across," said Ralph Bunche,
"wrap it up in a person."
Such was the essence of the man; he conveyed ideas that influenced
history. After serving in the U.S. War Department and State Department
during World War II, Bunche was active in the preliminary planning
of the United Nations. He joined the permanent U.N. Secretariat
in New York in 1947. The next year he was unexpectedly thrust into
the role of brokering a truce between warring Arabs and Jews in
the Middle East when the chief mediator was assassinated. For his
success in negotiating a peaceful settlement, Bunche received the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1950.
Bunche was born in 1904 in Detroit, Mich. After receiving his degree
from UCLA, he earned graduate degrees in government and international
relations at Harvard. But it was to UCLA — a school to which
he initially was reluctant to apply but did so at the insistence
of his grandmother — that Bunche would ascribe much of his
future success.
"UCLA is where it all began for me, where, in a sense, I began,"
he said during the dedication of Bunche Hall in 1969. "College
for me was the genesis and the catalyst."
He joined the faculty of Howard University, where he established
the department of political science. He later collaborated with
Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal on a monumental study of race
relations in the U.S., which was published in 1944 as An American
Dilemma.
At the U.N., Bunche became Under-Secretary-General in 1955, undertaking
several peacekeeping missions around the world. He also became active
in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and, though his health was beginning
to decline, participated in civil rights marches in the South.
Illness forced his retirement in 1971 — the U.N.'s highest-ranking
American and one of the most universally admired citizens of the
world. He died in December 1971.
Photo courtesy of the United Nations. Story by David Greenwald.
Ralph Bunche was born August 7, 1904 and died December 9, 1971.
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