This Day in Black History: December 10th
Ralph J. Bunche became the first African American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize on this day on December 10, 1950.
Born in Detroit in 1904 and primarily raised by his grandmother in Los Angeles. After graduating as valedictorian from UCLA and earning a doctorate in political science from Harvard, he taught at Howard University.
During World War II, he joined the Office of Strategic Services as a senior analyst on colonial affairs. By 1944, he was helping shape the postwar order as part of the US delegation to the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, followed by the 1945 San Francisco Conference that produced the United Nations Charter. He later played a major role in drafting UN policy on territories transitioning away from colonial control.
Bunche’s path to the Nobel Prize began in the late 1940s, when he became a key figure in UN efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Serving first as an aide to mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, he assumed the lead role after Bernadotte’s 1948 assassination. On the island of Rhodes, Bunche negotiated the 1949 armistice agreements between Israel and neighboring Arab states. The accords did not end the conflict but halted open fighting and marked the first successful UN mediation of a major international dispute.
The Nobel Committee honored him the following year for what it called his outstanding achievement in the arduous work of peace.
Bunche spent the rest of his career at the UN, rising to Under Secretary General and taking on crises from the Congo to Cyprus. He died in 1971 at age 67.