Bunche, Ralph

Bunche, Ralph (Johnson)

Ralph Bunche.

(credit: H. Roger-Viollet)

(born Aug. 7, 1904, Detroit, Mich., U.S.—died Dec. 9, 1971, New York, N.Y.) U.S. diplomat. He earned graduate degrees at Harvard University and taught at Howard University from 1928. After studying colonial policy in Africa, he collaborated with Gunnar Myrdal in An American Dilemma (1944), a study of U.S. race relations. He worked in the U.S. war and state departments during World War II. In 1947 he became director of the trusteeship department of the UN Secretariat. His work in forging a truce between Palestinian Arabs and Jews earned him the 1950 Nobel Prize for Peace. As UN undersecretary for political affairs, he oversaw UN peacekeeping forces around the Suez Canal (1956), in the Congo (1960), and in Cyprus (1964). He also served on the board of the NAACP for 22 years.