True, his father, a barber, drifted early out of the picture, and his mother contracted tuberculosis and died when Bunche was thirteen. Half a century after his death, we still can’t see him whole.īorn in 1903, Bunche didn’t like being described as the ‘grandson of slaves’, less because he was a stickler for accuracy (he was the great-grandson) than because he felt it exaggerated his personal hardships. (Writing this essay, I have drawn on all three biographies and on Henry’s edition of Bunche’s writings.) Bunche is a complex subject, someone who chose administration over advocacy and international service over national politics, but who, because of his race, but more precisely because of white America’s racial obsessions, could never fully control the use that was made of his life. In his new book, Kal Raustiala, who concentrates on Bunche’s work at the UN, admits that he hasn’t done it either. But no one has yet given Bunche the kind of magisterial treatment David Levering Lewis gave Du Bois. Two good biographies of Bunche appeared in the 1990s: a vivid and affectionate portrait by his UN colleague Brian Urquhart, and a perceptive study by the Berkeley historian Charles Henry that treats Bunche both as a significant figure in his own right and as a prism through which to examine America’s racial preoccupations. Scholars have been only marginally more attentive. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk in the Plato-to-Arendt ‘great books’ course mandatory for all sophomores, have probably never heard of the man who was, in the 1930s, one of Du Bois’s crucial collaborators as well as one of his sharpest critics. The Columbia undergraduates up the street, who read W.E.B. But Bunche is no longer a household name, and while the children entering that school can surely tell you something about Martin Luther King Jr, and probably about Malcolm X too, I wonder what they know of the man for whom their school is named. There is a Ralph Bunche Centre at UCLA, a Ralph J Bunche Award given by the American Political Science Association, a Ralph Bunche Park near the UN building and Ralph Bunche public schools dotted across the land – including one just north of Manhattan’s Morningside Park, four blocks from my office. When he was hospitalised, aides worked round his bed. When he lost his sight, Thant got him a driver. For almost another decade Hammarskjöld’s successor, U Thant, kept Bunche hard at it even as his physical ailments – phlebitis, heart disease, kidney trouble – worsened. In another eerie brush with fate, Bunche was meant to be on board at the last minute it had been decided that he should hold the fort in New York. In 1961 Hammarskjöld was killed when his plane was shot down on a peacekeeping mission to Katanga, the breakaway region of Congo. Lie’s successor as secretary-general, the Swedish diplomat and economist Dag Hammarskjöld, continued sending his indispensable civil servant to one trouble spot after another. He was the man with the ideas.’Īt Lie’s insistence, Bunche carried on solo, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for his mediation – the first Black man to win a Nobel and, suddenly, the most famous Black public figure in America. ‘I know we killed the wrong man,’ the assassin, Yehoshua Cohen, said years later. Bernadotte and the man who had taken Bunche’s seat were shot at point-blank range. A few months into the posting, Bunche missed a travel connection and so wasn’t in the car next to his partner (and third Scandinavian), the Swedish former Red Cross official Count Folke Bernadotte, when it was ambushed by the Stern Gang. Bunche was running the trusteeship division at the UN, proving himself capable, imaginative and cool in a crisis in 1948 Lie made him deputy in a two-man team charged with mediating the war being fought for control of Palestine. Ralph Bunche at a meeting of the UN Security Council in 1946.Ī half dozen years later Trygve Lie, the first secretary-general of the United Nations, appeared in Bunche’s life.
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