Ralph Bunche

Ralph Johnson Bunche (1903–1971) was an American political scientist and diplomat whose mediation of the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and the surrounding Arab states made him the first African American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Awarded in 1950, the prize honored months of patient shuttle diplomacy on the island of Rhodes that produced separate armistices with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.

Born in Detroit and orphaned at thirteen, Bunche was raised by his grandmother in Los Angeles and graduated as valedictorian from UCLA in 1927. He earned a PhD in government and international relations from Harvard in 1934, becoming the first African American to do so, and chaired the political science department at Howard University before joining the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.

At the State Department he helped draft the United Nations Charter sections on trusteeship, then moved to the UN itself in 1947. After the assassination of mediator Folke Bernadotte in 1948, Bunche took charge of the Palestine negotiations, an assignment that consumed eleven months and produced the framework that held for nearly two decades.

He spent the rest of his life at the United Nations, eventually as Under-Secretary-General, organizing peacekeeping operations in Suez (1956), the Congo (1960), Cyprus (1964), and Yemen. President Kennedy awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, and he marched with Martin Luther King Jr. at Selma in 1965.

The name Ralph derives from Old Norse Ráðúlfr, combining ráð (counsel) and úlfr (wolf), brought to England by Scandinavian settlers and later reinforced by the Norman form Radulf. He carried both elements honestly: counsel offered to warring parties, and the persistence of a wolf working a long trail.