BUNCHE, RALPH

Ralph Bunche (August 7, 1904–December 9, 1971) was the first black to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He received the honor in 1950 for his efforts on behalf of the United Nations (UN) in negotiating a truce between Egypt and Israel. He eventually became undersecretary-general of the UN. In the late 1960s, radical activists accused Bunche of ignoring domestic civil rights concerns, but in the 1930s Bunche had been a leading intellectual radical who attempted to steer civil rights groups in a new, activist direction that directly addressed black and white working class needs.

Bunche received his B.A. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Before he had completed his doctorate, Howard University hired Bunche as an instructor, and he organized and chaired the school's political science department. In 1934, when Bunche completed his dissertation on colonial governance in Africa, he became the first black American to earn the Ph.D. in political science.

When Bunche started working at Howard University his liberal political views became more radical and pronounced. He called upon the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to abandon its legalistic civil rights reform strategy for one that was dedicated to building an interracial workers' alliance. He argued that supporting class politics and instituting dramatic economic reform were the keys to solving blacks' second-class status. He publicly claimed the New Deal was a "raw deal" for blacks, and he openly worked with communists and socialists in organizing the National Negro Congress (NNC). The NNC, established in 1936, sought to build a coalition of organizations dedicated to solving the "Negro problem" through a new class politics. The same year, Bunche published A World View of Race, an aggressive critique of the imperialist and capitalist roots of racism.

Bunche's public political stances began to soften as fascism spread across Europe and as the United States became increasingly involved in the Allied war effort. He broke from the NNC when he concluded that it had become a tool of the Soviet Union. Due to his expertise in African affairs, the federal government hired Bunche as an African and Far East affairs analyst for what would become the Office of Strategic Services. He would later work for the State Department and then the UN.

Before he moved into the government, however, Bunche played a central role in the production of one of the most important social science surveys of black life in the United States: An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy(1944). This study, directed by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, became the cornerstone of liberal ideology on race issues for much of the civil rights era. As Myrdal's assistant, Bunche supervised numerous other researchers and produced several thousand pages (collected in four long "memos") of analysis of black political development in the South, black betterment organizations, and black leadership. One of these memoranda, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, was published posthumously in 1973.

BUNCHE, RALPH

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