Ralph Bunche was a distinguished American diplomat and scholar who became the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, honored for his work mediating an end to fighting in the Middle East. Born in Detroit and raised partly by his grandmother after the early death of his parents, he overcame poverty and prejudice to excel, graduating at the top of his class and earning a doctorate in political science from Harvard.
A leading scholar of colonialism and race, Bunche taught at Howard University and contributed to the landmark study of American race relations directed by Gunnar Myrdal. During the Second World War he worked in government intelligence and on planning for the postwar world, helping to draft key parts of the charter of the new United Nations.
He joined the United Nations and rose to become one of its most respected officials. His finest achievement came in 1948 and 1949, when, after the assassination of the chief mediator, Bunche took over the delicate task of negotiating armistice agreements between the new state of Israel and its Arab neighbors. His patient, skillful diplomacy ended the fighting and earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950.
Bunche served the United Nations for the rest of his career, pioneering its peacekeeping operations in trouble spots around the world and rising to become an undersecretary-general. A committed supporter of the American civil rights movement, he marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. He died in 1971, a symbol of the power of reasoned diplomacy.