UNITED NATIONS: A Man Without Color

• Share

Ralph J. Bunche was by his own admission a man of many predispositions. "I have a deep-seated bias against hate and intolerance," he once said. "I have a bias against racial and religious bigotry. I have a bias against war, a bias for peace. I have a bias which leads me to believe that no problem of human relations is ever insoluble."

From hard personal experience, Bunche knew other, less commendable prejudices. He was a black in a country biased against his race, and he was an

American in a world persuaded that no U.S. citizen could approach international relations with impartiality. Yet when he died last week at 67, six months after his health had forced him to resign as the United Nations Under Secretary-General, Bunche had achieved a unique status: a black without color and an American who belonged to all the nations.

His most spectacular success at the U.N. was undoubtedly the negotiation of the 1949 armistice between the newly born state of Israel and its Arab neighbors. For that achievement, he won the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. But Bunche was proudest of his 1956 role in organizing the 6,000-man U.N. peace-keeping force in the Sinai and Gaza, which maintained the peace for eleven years. "For the first time," he said then, "we have found a way to use military men for peace instead of war." It was Bunche, however, who advised Secretary-General U Thant in May 1967 that the Secretary-General had no legal alternative but to accede to Egypt's demand that the force be withdrawn. Many critics maintain that if Bunche and Thant had stalled the Egyptians and fought harder to keep the blue-helmeted troops on hand, the Six-Day War might have been averted.

Alabama Chase. Born in Detroit, the son of a barber, Bunche was orphaned at 13. He starred in football, baseball and basketball at the University of California at Los Angeles, but suffered a knee injury that was to trouble him the rest of his life. He graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors from U.C.L.A., took his doctorate at Harvard, later did advanced work in anthropology and colonial policy at Northwestern University, the London School of Economics and the University of Cape Town.

From 1938 to 1940, he did research for Swedish Sociologist Gunnar Myrdal's monumental study of U.S. race relations, An American Dilemma. The work took Bunche and Myrdal into the Deep South, where one night a mob of whites, angered by their questions about interracial sex, chased them across Alabama.