August 7, 1904
Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche is born in Detroit.
He moves to New Mexico with his family at age 10 in the hope that the dry air would be good for his parents, but both his barber father and his mother die within two years. He and his two sisters then are raised by his grandmother in Los Angeles.
He graduates summa cum laude from UCLA with a degree in international relations, then continues his education at Harvard University and teaches at Howard University. After working with the U.S. government, including the State Department, he moves to the United Nations in 1946.
He is appointed in 1947 to the staff of the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine, which develops the U.N. partition plan for Palestine, and serves as the deputy to U.N. chief mediator Count Folke Bernadotte during the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. After the assassination of Bernadotte, Bunche takes over as the chief U.N. negotiator and eventually secures armistice agreements between Israel and four Arab states. For that work, he is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950.
For more on Bunche:
- Bunche’s biography on the Nobel Peace Center page.
- The United Nations has a video about Bunche.
- The Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies.
