Ralph Bunche: A Man of the World, but Never at Home

Brian Urquhart, who was Ralph Bunche's chief assistant from 1954 until Bunche's death in 1971, succeeded him as United Nations Under?Secretary?General for Special Political affairs -- a position created for Bunche by U.N. Secretary?General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1953. Some years ago, Urquhart published a fine and rich biography of Hammarskjöld. He has now given us a sensitive, informative, comprehensive, and often heartbreaking biography of Bunche: a great book about a great man. There are three main topics in it: race, the role of the United Nations in world politics, and that of Bunche in the United Nations.

He was the great?grandson of a Baptist preacher and freemason. Orphaned at the age of 11, he was raised by his grandmother, Lucy, the daughter of a house slave. Bunche later said that she instilled in him "a desire to do my best in anything I tried to do . . . she taught me the value of self?respect and dignity." He went to college at UCLA, majoring in political science; thanks to a fellowship, he went to Harvard's Department of Government for graduate study, earning money by working in a bookshop. After receiving a master's degree, he was invited to become an instructor at Howard University and to set up its political science department.

GOING TO CLASS

Bunche met his future wife, Ruth Harris, while at Howard; she was the daughter of the chief mailing clerk in Montgomery, Alabama. He began working for his doctorate at Harvard in 1929 and married her in 1930; their first child was born in 1931. Soon thereafter he left for Africa to research his thesis: a comparison of French administration in the colony of Dahomey and in Togoland, a League of Nations mandate. The thesis, according to Urquhart, prefigured Bunche's later work on decolonization and trusteeships. His views on race at that time had a strong streak of Marxist economic determinism: imperialism was the product of capitalism; racial discrimination resulted from economic competition. He wrote and published a great deal in the 1930s and disagreed with both W.E.B. du Bois' idea of a "Negro nation within the nation" and the NAACP, which he deemed "incorrigibly middle class and elitist." He thought that racism could be cured only by improving the living conditions of the working classes. On a grant to study the crises of modern imperialism, he traveled to London, South Africa, Singapore, Batavia (now Jakarta), and Hong Kong. After his return to the United States, he worked part?time for Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal on the project that resulted in Myrdal's famous study of race, An American Dilemma. The two men became close despite substantial disagreements -- Myrdal "considered Marxism to be a fatalistic dogma and disagreed with Bunche's view that working class solidarity was the best basis for ending racial division," Urquhart writes.

SELMA AND SEOUL

In June 1941, F.D.R. created the Office of the Coordinator of Information -- later to become the Office of Strategic Services -- which needed an African specialist. The Harvard history department, consulted, recommended Bunche; Professor C. H. McIlwain called him "the best graduate student of his race at Harvard in my time." Urquhart comments that "even Harvard seems to have been unable to judge Bunche on his ability without reference to his race." Bunche joined the organization, but continued to suffer from Washington's racism: when the family dog died, he found that there was one section of the pet cemetery for white people's pets, another for blacks'. Bunche moved to the State Department to work on the colonial aspects of postwar planning. After having been "loaned" in April 1946 to the new U.N. Secretariat as acting head of the trusteeship division, the secretary?general, Trygve Lie, offered him a permanent position as director of his division. He accepted, partly because of his dislike of the segregation in Washington.

When he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for his role in ending the Arab?Israeli conflict the previous year, he was irritated by the frequent references in the American press to his race: he hated being described (falsely) as the grandson of a slave or as the first American Negro to have done this or that. By the 1950s, his own view of race had evolved from an emphasis on economics to one on racism as a matter of "our thinking and concepts." But he still believed that the only proper way for American blacks to advance was to join the civil rights movement and fight for racial integration and full equality. He was critical of black extremists and their "fantasy of separation" and supportive of the Reverend Martin Luther King, whom he joined in 1965 for a march from Selma to Montgomery. The Watts riots of August 1965 revived his conviction that the black ghetto was at the root of racial tension and that the ideal of integration required "the dispersal of every black ghetto in the land." But his "call to arms" against ghettos, written for Look magazine, was never published, and he failed to persuade the trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation to support his proposals. One of his last speeches denounced worldwide polarization between whites and nonwhites, and one of the reasons for his hostility to the Vietnam War -- in which his son served -- was the plight of blacks "who were in Vietnam to fight for the rights and freedoms of seventeen million South Vietnamese" but did not enjoy full constitutional rights at home. He himself suffered racial slurs and slights all his life.

REWRITING WAR AND PEACE