Ralph Bunche never rose to the higher ranks of American officialdom because he was black and never rose to the highest position in the United Nations because he was American. Yet there is little doubt that he deserves acclaim as one of the great civil servants of the 20th century, a man who helped infuse the United Nations for its first two decades with integrity, intelligence, and sensitive diplomatic skill.
He was born in Detroit on August 7, 1903, the son of a barber often out of work and of a beautiful, sickly mother. The family moved from Detroit to Cleveland to Knoxville to Toledo to Detroit to Albuquerque before his mother died of tuberculosis in 1917 and his father dropped out of sight. Bunche was thirteen. He and his sister were then brought up by their maternal grandparents in Los Angeles.
His grandmother, whom he called Nana, was surely the single most important influence on his life. She was so light-skinned that she could easily have denied her culture, but refused to do so. "Nana was fiercely proud of her origin and her race, and everyone in our 'clan' got the race-pride message very early in life," Bunche once wrote. "It has stuck with me." When Ralph graduated from Jefferson High School in Los Angeles as the valedictorian in 1922, the principal told Nana that her grandson was such a good student that the teachers and staff had never thought of him as a Negro. "You are wrong to say that," replied Nana angrily. "It is an insult to Ralph, to me, to his parents and his whole race. Why haven't you thought of him as a Negro? He is a Negro and he is proud of it. So am I."
Brian Urquhart, his colleague and biographer, who had access to Bunche's private files after his death, cites numerous instances of Bunche's need to prove himself in a society that classified him first and foremost as a black. Harvard historian Benjamin Fielding Wright, recommending Bunche for a government position, described him in 1941 as "one of the few-perhaps the only-Negro graduate student╔ at Harvard╔ able to compete for fellowships on equal terms with the better white students."
His wife, Ruth, in a complaining letter, once wrote to him, "l know you think you are the Miracle Negro with the whites, but I am sure you are just a novelty and whom they can get two men's work out of╔ though it may be killing you and hurting your family." Bunche replied with some exasperation at her complaint that "much of my conduct in the presence of whites is not at all the result of any special feeling about them, but a calculated and deliberate intent to prove to them that I am, despite my race, their equal if not their superior in intellect, ability, knowledge and general savoir-faire." He attended the opening session of the San Francisco conference as an adviser to the American delegation and wrote Ruth, "I did feel a bit proud this afternoon at being the only Negro who sat on the first floor."
He graduated from UCLA (then known as the University of California, Southern Branch) with highest honors in political science in 1927. He was valedictorian, president of the debating society, a star of the basketball team and a writer for the Daily Bruin, the college newspaper. He won a fellowship at Harvard University, completed his master's degree and then accepted an appointment to Howard University in Washington. Howard wanted him to reorganize its political science department. This was Bunche's first experience at living in a segregated city and he did not like it. "Living in the nation's capital is like serving out a sentence," he said. "It's extremely difficult for a Negro to maintain even a semblance of human dignity in Washington."
In the 1930's, Bunche married Ruth, a student at Howard, taught at Howard, completed his doctorate at Harvard and won several grants that allowed him to study and conduct research in Europe and Africa. He wrote his dissertation on "French Administration in Togoland and Dahomey." He was not a sophisticated traveler. "French food is terrible," he wrote Ruth after a few days in Paris, "I've had indigestion and dysentery ever since I've been here." He also studied at the London School of Economics, attending the weekly cultural studies class of anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. His most flamboyant classmate was Jomo Kenyatta, the future president of Kenya, who championed female circumcision and posed for his book Facing Mount Kenya wearing skins and brandishing a spear. By the beginning of World War II, Bunche was one of the few specialists on Africa in the United States.
Bunche, however, did not neglect studies of the role of the black in American society. In 1940, he was a close associate of the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, who published the monumental study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem in Modern Democracy in 1944. Bunche wrote four monographs for Myrdal's study, including a 1,660-page analysis, The Political Status of the Negro. Myrdal's An American Dilemma held its place as the premier examination of the place of the black in America for more than a generation.
During World War II, Bunche worked for the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services), the forerunner of the CIA, mainly preparing analyses of African politics. In 1944, however, the State Department asked him to join its team preparing proposals for a future international organization. The team needed a specialist who knew a good deal about colonialism and mandates-the former German and Turkish colonies that had been parceled out to the World War I victors under the supervision of the League of Nations. The UN would continue the system, change the name of mandates to trusteeships and prepare them for independence.
In the role of a specialist advising the US delegations on colonialism and trusteeships, Bunche took part in the Dumbarton Oaks, San Francisco and London preparatory conferences. After the establishment of the UN, he worked for the Secretariat for a few months. Trygve Lie then asked the State Department if it would object to the permanent appointment of Bunche to the UN Secretariat as director of the trusteeship division. The United States agreed, and Bunche took up his new post at the end of 1946. Since the San Francisco conference, he had been hoping for a new UN career that would take him away from Washington. "In many ways it would be great for all of us and especially the children," he had written Ruth, "-a new life, new surroundings, good schools, no ghettoes and no Jim Crow."
From United Nations, The First 50 Years, by Stanley Meisler, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1995, Reprinted by Permission
