To the Church Born

Powell was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 29, 1908, the son of the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., and Mattie Fletcher Shaffer. The year after his birth, his father was appointed minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City, where the family took up residence and Powell attended school. In 1923, Reverend Powell moved his church and family uptown, to Harlem, where the church grew to become the largest congregation in America and a major force in the black community.

After the Great Depression began in 1929, the young Powell ran a soup kitchen serving hard-hit Harlem. There, he earned a reputation for tremendous compassion. It was said, for instance, that Powell gave his own shoes to a man unable to find the right size in the church shoe bin. Following a brief stint at the City College of New York, Powell entered Colgate University in upstate New York in 1930. His plan was to become a surgeon, but on graduation, he decided to follow his father’s footsteps—and advice—and study for the ministry, eventually earning a degree in religious education from Columbia University in 1932. In 1933, ever active in Harlem’s late-night social scene, he married a dancer from the famed Cotton Club, Isabel Washington. He succeeded his father at the helm of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1937.

Before and after assuming leadership of the church, Powell was active in the world of politics. In 1935, he helped found the National Negro Congress, a coalition of black leaders, preachers, labor organizers, workers, businessmen, and politicians. Powell also wrote a column for a Harlem weekly called the Amsterdam News, and took the first steps to increase employment opportunities for African Americans by pressuring New York’s telephone and utility companies, its transit system, its colleges and universities, and even the 1939 World’s Fair to hire Blacks. During the 1940s, in the midst of war, Powell published his own weekly newspaper, The People’s Voice. He also moved easily in traditional political circles, gaining appointment to positions in the New York Office of Price Administration and the Manhattan civil defense committee. In the midst of all this, he published a history of the African American struggle for freedom and equal rights.

Powell was elected to the New York City Council in 1941. After serving for just three years, with the Council seat and his church as twin political bases, he won election to become Harlem’s first representative in Congress. Powell was outraged when he arrived in Washington to find that Jim Crow House rules banned even a member of Congress from its dining rooms, barbershops, and other facilities. He effectively ended this segregationist practice, however, by simply ignoring such bans and encouraging his staff to do the same. He also put an end to the tradition of excluding black reporters from the House press gallery.

New Deal Dealer

Powell’s years in Congress were marked by a direct, confrontational style and unwavering support for progressive causes. He never missed an opportunity to back equal employment opportunities for Blacks, and repeatedly introduced legislation to eliminate discrimination in federal agencies and by federal contractors. In 1956, impatient with the influence of the southern segregationists who made up a significant wing of the Democratic party, Powell shocked his fellow Democrats by endorsing Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower in the President’s successful bid for reelection.

Powell divorced his first wife in 1945, and married pianist and singer Hazel Scott. This second marriage also ended in divorce, and in 1960, he married Yvette Flores, daughter of the former mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico. In the same year, he made an error that haunted him to the end of his life. During a radio interview, he made inflammatory, off-the-cuff comments about another resident of Harlem, an action that led to a successful libel suit. When he refused to pay the judgment, Powell was cited for contempt of court, and this eventually led to an investigation of all his affairs by a Congressional committee.

From 1961 to 1967, as Chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, Powell secured the passage of a series of groundbreaking laws promoting equality and equity in employment and education. These included acts establishing the federal minimum wage, vocational training programs, and the expansion of student loan and grant programs. But in 1967, after the investigative committee issued its findings, the House took the unprecedented, and it was later determined, unconstitutional step of voting to expel Powell from Congress. Harlem voters, though, refused to elect anyone else to fill his seat, which sat empty until 1969 when the House allowed his return. By this time, however, Powell had little influence or power, and in the 1970 primary, he was defeated by Charles Rangel. Exhausted and seriously ill, he resigned as minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and retired to Miami, Florida, where he died on April 4, 1972, at the age of 63. Powell’s life had extreme highs and lows, but he nevertheless left a legacy of historic proportions in the struggle for equal rights.

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Diverse Origins

Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii, where his black father and white mother had met. His mother, Ann Dunham, moved there with her parents from Kansas following World War II. His father, Barack Obama, Sr., grew up in rural Kenya, and earned a scholarship that enabled him to study at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where Ann was also a student. They married in 1961, and had one child.

The couple separated when Obama was two years old, and in 1964, they divorced. Barack Senior returned to Kenya, leaving Ann to raise her son. Her struggles as a working single mother made an early impression on the boy, as did her values of service and compassion. She remarried, and the family moved to her husband’s home country of Indonesia in 1967 where Obama remained until he was 10 years old. He then returned to Honolulu and was subsequently raised by his maternal grandparents. After graduating from high school, he studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years, then transferred to Columbia University in New York City where he majored in political science and graduated in 1983 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Obama spent several years working in New York, and relocated to Chicago in 1985. There, he began working with the Developing Communities Project, a church-based organization, as a community organizer, committed to destitute areas affected by high unemployment and crime. His achievements were significant, but as a result of the experience, he came to understand that effecting real change would require action at the level of the political and legal systems. Obama visited Kenya in 1988, where he met many of his deceased father’s relatives for the first time. He was accepted at Harvard Law School that year, graduating in 1991 after serving as the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. This resulted in a contract for him to write a book about race relations, which became the memoir Dreams from My Father.

Returning to Chicago shortly thereafter, Obama began teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago, while practicing as a civil and neighborhood rights attorney and serving on numerous social action boards of directors. In 1992, he married Michelle Robinson, whom he’d met in 1989 as a summer associate at the Chicago law firm where she worked. They would have two daughters, Malia born in 1999 and Natasha (nicknamed Sasha) born in 2001. Following his path of progressive social action, Obama then ran for and was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996. He served there for three terms and eight years, often reaching out to unify Republicans and Democrats to achieve important goals and progressive policies in areas such as taxation, welfare reform, and education.

Higher Office

Obama had run unsuccessfully in the Illinois Democratic primary for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000. Nevertheless, in 2003, he began campaigning for a seat in the U.S. Senate. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he was exposed to a national audience for the first time when he delivered the keynote address. The response was immediate, with political insiders citing his presidential potential, and ordinary Americans resonating with his message of unity and promise as expressed by the speech’s title, “The Audacity of Hope.” Propelled by this electrifying debut, he won the primary and general election for the Senate in 2004 by the largest margin in Illinois history, and became only the third African American so honored since Reconstruction.

Acknowledged by his Senate peers as an exceptionally promising freshman, Obama continued to work with leaders from both parties in a spirit of bipartisan cooperation to create important legislation. He served on the Foreign Relations, Environment and Public Works, and Veterans’ Affairs Committees, and worked on arms proliferation, climate change, and ethics reform among other notable achievements. In 2006, he published a second book titled The Audacity of Hope, which climbed to the top of the best-seller lists.

On February 10, 2007, with Senator Hillary Clinton the self-described presumptive Democratic nominee for President in the 2008 election, Obama announced his unlikely candidacy for the office at the site of President Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech of 1858. Shattering fund-raising records and enlisting a vast army of small contributors, Obama emerged victorious in June of that year despite controversies over his former pastor that led to Obama’s historic speech on race entitled “A More Perfect Union.” In a difficult, and frequently acrimonious general campaign against Republican nominee Senator John McCain, Obama distinguished himself with his poise and articulate focus on key issues affecting all Americans, and continued to raise record-breaking sums from a growing grassroots base of support. His choice of Senator Joe Biden, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as running mate offered a stark contrast to the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, as did his constant message of hope and unity epitomized by the hugely popular refrain, “Yes we can.”

Over the course of the campaign, Obama steadily established and widened a leading margin in polls, which accelerated with the deterioration of the U.S. economy in the fall of 2008. Toward the end of the contest, he campaigned actively in Republican strongholds, seeking a broad mandate from the electorate to enact his theme of “The change we need.”

On November 4, 2008, history was made. Obama became the 44th President-Elect of the United States with a landslide victory of 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 162, the first Black elected to the highest office in the land. One hundred and forty-six years after the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans’ march toward freedom, civil rights, equity, and full participation culminated in the leadership of this nation. A dream too long deferred had been realized. A new chapter in American history had begun.

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A Natural Born Cartoonist

Harrington was born in New York City on February 14, 1912, the child of Herbert Harrington, a railroad porter, and the former Euzenie Turat, a recent immigrant from Austria-Hungary. Raised in an ethnically diverse neighborhood of the Bronx, Harrington’s childhood among a racially mixed family of limited means was challenging for himself and his four siblings. But from a very young age, he was an exceptional artist, and able to find solace by drawing satirical cartoons.

The New York public school system, recognizing Harrington’s artistic talent but blinded by racial stereotypes of the day, sent him to a Manhattan vocational high school designed to prepare students for a career in the textile industry. Harrington accepted the education, but kept his sights on cartooning and the flourishing black culture of the Harlem Renaissance. After finishing  his vocational training in 1931, he was able to enroll at the National Academy of Design in Manhattan. There, he refined his skills as an artist under the school’s accomplished faculty and earned a modest living as an actor, puppeteer, set designer, and cartoonist.

In 1932, Harrington began selling political cartoons to Harlem newspapers, including the widely circulated and influential Amsterdam News. He also began attending classes at New York University and became close, lifelong friends with the artist Romare Bearden. The Amsterdam News put Harrington on staff in 1935, and began regular publication of a series. Harrington first called it “Dark Laughter,” but later changed it to “Bootsie” after its main character, an ordinary looking, somewhat corpulent resident of Harlem with a unique knack for revealing racial hypocrisy and irony wherever they were found. “Bootsie,” the first cartoon series by a black artist to break onto the national stage, cemented Harrington’s reputation.

During this period, Harrington increasingly associated himself with fellow left-wing and, in some cases, communist New York journalists. He continued to sell political cartoons, and took a position as art instructor in the Works Progress Administration, the Roosevelt administration program that employed thousands of artists during the Great Depression. Connections he made at the WPA led to his admission to the prestigious School of Fine Arts at Yale, where Harrington paid his tuition by continuing to sell cartoons and by waiting on tables. At Yale, Harrington won several awards for his art but also complained that many opportunities eluded him due to racism.

Harrington made an important connection in 1942 when Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., minister of the largest church in Harlem and future congressman, named him art editor of the new Harlem newspaper, People’s Voice. Harrington created a new comic strip for the Voice called “Live Gray.” The following year, he became war correspondent for Robert Lee Vann’s Pittsburgh Courier, one of the largest African American newspapers in the country. In Europe, as a reporter and political cartoonist, Harrington covered black units such as the Tuskegee airmen. He also entered into the first of three marriages, this one barely outlasting the war.

After the war, Harrington was commissioned by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to help conduct a public relations campaign in support of returning black veterans, who, as a group, had been poorly treated. But Harrington’s politics were not in line with those of the NAACP. He had a falling out with the organization in 1947, and resumed his career as a political activist and cartoonist by reviving the “Bootsie” series for the Courier. In 1950, he was named art editor of Freedom, a left-wing newspaper founded by the singer Paul Robeson, and took a position as art instructor at New York’s Jefferson School of Social Sciences, a school with a prominent position on the long government list of purportedly subversive and communist organizations.

Exalted Expatriate

By 1952, it was clear to Harrington that he was walking straight into the teeth of the national crusade led by Senator Joseph McCarthy against left-wing activists. After he, himself, was questioned by the FBI over biting cartoons he had produced about the continued existence of lynching in the United States, and when one after another of his friends and associates was prosecuted or blacklisted, Harrington decided to leave the United States. Arriving in Paris, France, he became an important member of a community of expatriate black artists that included writers Richard Wright and Chester Himes, and supported himself, barely, by continuing to produce “Bootsie” for the Courier. Except for a second, equally brief marriage, and a short stint in England, Harrington remained in Paris until 1959 when he was honored with an invitation from the Soviet humor magazine Krokodil to serve as visiting artist. His acceptance, in the midst of the Cold War, did nothing for his political reputation in the United States.

Harrington entered the final phase of his life in 1961 when he left Paris for East Germany. There, he found a lasting marriage to Helma Richter, and an excellent position as journalist and cartoonist for communist state publications. Ironically, Harrington’s life and status on the other side of the Berlin Wall gave him the opportunity to travel extensively in the west, and in 1994, with the McCarthy era long over, he briefly returned to the United States as a visiting journalism professor at Michigan State University. After his death in Germany in 1995, Harrington was honored with the establishment of the Oliver Wendell Harrington Cartoon Art Collection at the Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art in Savannah, Georgia.

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Diplomatic Ambitions

Wharton was born on May 11, 1899, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Rosalind Griffin and William B. Wharton. Raised in Boston, he was fortunate enough to attend English High School, the nation’s oldest public high school. The school was alma mater to many historical luminaries including the Smithsonian Institution’s secretary and aeronautical pioneer Samuel Pierpont Langley and Korean War General Matthew Ridgeway. On graduation from high school, Wharton entered Boston University where he received a bachelor’s of law degree in 1920. The same year, he passed the Massachusetts bar.

Wharton entered into law practice in Boston, and worked toward a master of law degree, which he received from Boston University in 1923. The following year, he bucked both official and tacit federal policy by becoming the first African American to receive an offer of a professional position—law clerk—in the State Department. Then Chairman of the State Department’s personnel board, Joseph Grew, openly and adamantly opposed accepting Blacks into the department’s professional ranks. Wharton, who had a light complexion, initially may have been presumed White by otherwise discriminatory policymakers. Also in 1924, he married Harriet Banks with whom he would have four children.

Despite Wharton’s relative acceptance at the State Department, he was relegated to menial paperwork, and often received cold and silent treatment from his coworkers and upper administrators who had surmised his race. Several major reforms were introduced into the diplomatic corps under the Rogers Act of 1924, which first established the U.S. Foreign Service. The goal of the Rogers Act was to increase professionalism and eliminate a long-standing system of elitism and patronage in diplomatic and consular positions. Among the efforts to achieve this goal was an exam to test aptitude for the position of foreign service officer. Wharton promptly took the test.

Only 20 out of 144 candidates passed the extremely difficult written test for entrance to the Foreign Service, and Wharton was among them. Chairman Grew moved quickly to marginalize his success, however. In a letter that is still preserved, Grew wrote: “Only twenty passed, including one negro who will go at once to Liberia.” Grew announced the Liberia assignment the day after Wharton was accepted into the Foreign Service, and in his haste to get Wharton out of the country, simply excluded him from the officer training that new appointees were required, at least in principle, to receive.

Stymied by Racism

The State Department had a long-standing policy of sending its black diplomats to Liberia—or sometimes Haiti or the Canary Islands—and keeping them there. The policy dated back to Reconstruction when Ebenezer D. Basset was named the first black member of the diplomatic corps. Over the next several years, a considerable number of diplomatic appointments and postings to these countries were assigned to other African Americans. Wharton’s experience half a century later showed that establishment of the Foreign Service and introduction of the merit system had changed little. Three other African Americans who were already consulate employees—William H. Hunt, James G. Carter, and William J. Yerby—found themselves in the same situation as Wharton when they, too, earned positions as Foreign Service officers on the basis of merit in 1925: each was relegated to Liberia, Haiti, or the Canaries.

It was two decades before Wharton was able to break this cycle. From 1925 to 1929, he served as vice consul in Monrovia, Liberia. He then moved on to Las Palmas, the Canaries, holding the position of consul. In 1936, Wharton was sent back to Monrovia, where he remained for two years before returning to Las Palmas. In 1942, he was sent to Antananarivo, Madagascar, and in 1945, found himself in Ponta Delgada, the Azores, two other places considered appropriate for African Americans. Wharton remained in the Azores four years. This head-spinning routine of shuttling African Americans back and forth among these locations was known in the diplomatic corps as the “Negro Circuit.”

President Harry Truman was the driving force in breaking this pattern of discrimination and racism in the State Department. Soon after the end of World War II—a conflict in which segregated African American soldiers compiled a distinguished record in defense of a country in which they were second-class citizens—Truman issued an executive order integrating the U.S. armed forces. Under Truman, in 1949, the State Department finally allowed an African American to break its unofficial color barrier when it appointed Wharton diplomatic consul to Lisbon, Portugal. Having been previously divorced, Wharton celebrated his achievement with his new wife, Evangeline Spears, whom he married in 1949. He served in Lisbon until 1953, at which time he became consul general in Marseille, France. Finally, in 1958, under President Dwight Eisenhower, the last barrier to African American careers in the State Department was breached when Wharton was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Romania. After this initial appointment as full ambassador, Wharton went on to serve in that capacity in Norway, at the behest of President John F. Kennedy. He also was asked to be the U.S. representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and to serve as a delegate to the United Nations.

After retiring from the U.S. Foreign Service in 1964, he lived a quiet life in Phoenix, Arizona. He died there, on April 23, 1990, at age 90. Wharton is an iconic figure in diplomatic lore, remembered as one of the first merit-based foreign service officers and as the diplomat who most proved the value of skill over favoritism.

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Early Promise and Potential

Harris was born in 1924 in Mattoon, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Her father was a railroad Pullman Porter, and her mother was a schoolteacher. Harris attended high school in Chicago, where her performance earned her a scholarship to Howard University in Washington, D.C. While at Howard, Harris was exposed to racial injustice and segregation in the nation’s capitol, then as now a city with a large African American population. In 1943, she participated in a sit-in to force the desegregation of a lunch counter as part of the emerging civil rights movement. She graduated summa cum laude in 1945 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science. She also met a law school professor there, William B. Harris, whom she would soon marry.

Returning to Chicago, Harris served as Program Director of the local branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in 1946, while attending graduate school at the University of Chicago. She then pursued further graduate studies back in Washington, D.C. from 1949 through 1950, this time at American University. During and after this period of graduate study, Harris served as an Assistant Director of the Civil Rights Agency of the American Council on Human Rights, and from 1956 through 1960 she chaired the Housing Committee of the Washington Urban League. At her husband’s urging, she attended George Washington University Law School, graduating in 1960 at the very top of her class.

Upon graduation, Harris began work as a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice. This lasted only one year, when she was appointed to the faculty of the Law School at Howard University. She attained the rank of Associate Professor while becoming active in Democratic political circles, and was asked to serve on a number of federal civil rights commissions. Shortly after a meeting with Robert Kennedy in 1963, she was named Co-Chair for the National Women’s Committee for Civil Rights. In 1964, Harris gave the seconding address for the presidential nomination of Lyndon B. Johnson, with an emphasis on securing equal rights and universal justice.

An African American Ambassador

In 1965, President Johnson named Harris to the position of U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg. She was confirmed by the Senate, and became the first black woman to serve in an ambassadorial role. This lasted until 1967, when she returned to Howard University and the rank of full professor. In 1969, she was named Dean of the Law School, but just one month later a student protest polarized opinion on campus. Harris was vocally opposed to the protest, earning her the enmity of much of the student body. The senior administration of the school would not support her, and she resigned in 1969.

Harris entered private practice in corporate law, while remaining active in civil rights circles. She worked with the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP, serving on the Fund’s executive board from 1967 through 1977. Then, in recognition of her achievements in federal and public service, President Jimmy Carter nominated Harris as Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1977. During a contentious Senate confirmation hearing, she was criticized for her establishment connections and questioned by Senator William Proxmire as to whether or not she was adequately attuned to the problems of poor Americans. Harris’ response was eloquent, moving, and to the point: “Senator, I am one of them. You do not seem to understand who I am. I’m a black woman, the daughter of a dining car waiter. I’m a black woman who even eight years ago could not buy a house in some parts of the District of Columbia. Senator, to say I’m not by and of and for the people is to show a lack of understanding of who I am and where I came from.”

She was ultimately confirmed, becoming the first African American woman at the Cabinet Secretary level. Harris transformed a department with a reputation for inefficient operations and ineffective results. She brought strong management to the bureaucracy, while improving its ability to provide better access for minorities to affordable housing, building greater economic opportunities in blighted neighborhoods, and battling discrimination against women in mortgage lending. President Carter reshuffled his Cabinet in the summer of 1979, at which time he nominated Harris to take over as Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. She was again confirmed, and served as Secretary of what became known as the Department of Health and Human Services until the end of the Carter administration in 1981.

Harris returned to private law practice, and became Professor of Law at the George Washington National Law Center. In 1982, she ran against Marion S. Barry in the mayoral election for the District of Columbia. She lost, partly due to her failure to convince voters that a strong manager was preferable to a skilled politician, and partly due to her continued identification with the middle class. She died of breast cancer on March 23, 1985, leaving a legacy of achievement in the social and civil rights realms and an unparalleled record of “firsts” for African American women: ambassador, cabinet secretary, major corporate board member, participant in a presidential nomination, dean of a law school, and others. Harris’ published writings included “Law and Moral Issues,” “To Fill the Gap,” and “Problems and Solutions in Achieving Equality for Women.”

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Unlimited Potential

Bunche was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1904. His father, Fred, was a barber in a shop serving an exclusively white clientele. Both he and Bunche’s mother, Olive, suffered from poor health. The family moved to New Mexico when their son was 10 in the hope the climate would favor them, but the parents died two years later. Bunche and his two sisters were taken to Los Angeles and raised by their grandmother, who had been born into slavery. She imparted to her charges a philosophy of self-respect and unlimited potential for those willing to work hard for success. Bunche took the lesson to heart early on by selling newspapers, working as a house-boy and carpet-layer, and doing other odd jobs to help with the family’s slim earnings.

No sooner did Bunche begin school than his remarkable intellect made itself evident. He earned prizes in English and history in elementary school, and at Jefferson High School he competed in numerous sports, was a debater, and was class valedictorian, even while being denied admission to the citywide honor society due to his race. Continuing at the University of California at Los Angeles, he received an athletic scholarship. While working as a janitor to earn his living expenses, he succeeded in playing varsity basketball, continued in debating and journalism, and in 1927 received his bachelors degree summa cum laude with a major in international relations, once again class valedictorian and Phi Beta Kappa.

Harvard University awarded Bunche a scholarship for graduate studies in political science, supplemented by a cash gift donated by the African American community of Los Angeles. He earned his masters degree in 1928 and continued directly to doctoral studies at Harvard while intermittently teaching at Howard University. There he also chaired the Political Science Department until 1950, and met his wife Ruth Harris whom he married in 1930 and with whom he would have three children. He conducted field research in Africa, and won the Toppan Prize for outstanding research for his dissertation in 1934. He was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard in political science.

Bunche’s civil rights activism began during this period. He defended activist students at Howard, served as co-director of the Institute of Race Relations at Swarthmore College in 1936, and wrote “A World View of Race,” a study of race relations in the U.S., in that year. His work with Swedish Sociologist Gunnar Myrdal contributed to Myrdal’s classic 1944 book on U.S. racism, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. He was consulted by U.S. Presidents on racial matters, and became a close associate of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who he joined to lead the Montgomery, Alabama civil rights march while serving on the board of the NAACP. His intellectual strength informed his philosophy, “Segregation and democracy are incompatible.”

The culmination of Bunche’s academic and social insights occurred in his work with the U.S. government and the United Nations. He advised the State Department and military on colonial regions during World War II, and became acting chief of the Division of Dependent Area Affairs (a position initially refused him due to prejudice). He was the first Black to serve on the U.S. delegation to the first General Assembly of the nascent U.N. At the request of Secretary General Trygve Lie in 1946, Bunche was placed in charge of the U.N.’s Department of Trusteeship. His ongoing relationship with that organization led to his most historically significant achievement, defusing the Arab-Jewish conflict in what was then known as Palestine. From 1947 to 1949, first as Principal Secretary of the U.N. Palestine Commission and then as acting U.N. Mediator on Palestine, Bunche worked to ease the escalating conflict and violence in the region. After a tireless round of mediation and negotiation lasting much of the year 1949, he obtained armistice agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Recognition of the achievement was immediate. Upon his return to the U.S., the city of Los Angeles created “Ralph Bunche Day,” the NAACP awarded him its highest honor, the Spingarn Prize. In 1950 he became the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He continued his involvement with the U.N. as Undersecretary for Special Political Affairs and Undersecretary General, the highest-ranking U.S. diplomat in the U.N. He is credited with creating the first U.N. peacekeeping force in response to the Suez Crisis, and with developing the mediation principles now used in all U.N. peacekeeping efforts.

Bunche’s health began to fail in 1970, and he died in 1971 with an enormous record of achievement. He had received over 40 honorary degrees, the Theodore Roosevelt Association Medal of Honor, the Presidential Medal of Honor, and the U.S. Medal of Freedom. He worked with world leaders such as Gamal Abdal Nasser, Dean Rusk, John F. Kennedy, Dag Hammarskjöld, U Thant, Lyndon Johnson, and Jawaharlal Nehru. A park named “The Ralph Bunche Park,” dedicated to peace, is located facing the United Nations building in New York City. Upon his death, the U.N. General Assembly stood for a moment of silence, perhaps the most articulate eulogy possible for such a great man of peace.

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