By the time this newsletter arrives in your inbox, I’ll be exploring (for the first time) Israel and the West Bank. More on this trip when I return. In preparation,
I’ve been thinking a lot about one of my heroes, whose reputation as a human rights leader was partially forged in the negotiations around the creation of Israel and the preservation of an autonomous Palestinian state.
This is taken from Righting Wrongs: 20 human rights heroes around the world. Scroll to the bottom if you’re interested in entering a contest for a free copy from the publisher.
And yes, that’s my hero, Ralph J. Bunche, next to the globe (along with Hansa Mehta, the subject of my last newsletter)!
As a kid, Bunche probably never imagined that he’d play such an important international role. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was only 12. His grandmother moved Bunche and his two sisters to Los Angeles, where Bunche became a star student and athlete. Yet because Bunche was Black, he didn’t receive the same treatment as his white counterparts.
Bunche was handsome, with a square jaw and broad smile. As a senior, he earned the highest grades in his graduating class. Yet the city of Los Angeles omitted him from city-wide honors because of his race. “Naturally, my experiences with racial prejudice have never been pleasant,” he later wrote, “but I have never let any of them trouble me very much or cause me to become embittered.”
At the University of California at Los Angeles, Bunche supported himself with an athletic scholarship and by cleaning buildings. He later went on to become the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in political science.
In 1928, Bunche founded the political science department at Howard University, an historically Black college in Washington, DC. At the time, news from abroad was dire. War brewed in Asia and Europe. An attempt to bring the world together in a League of Nations had failed. Still, Bunche believed in international cooperation. One friend considered Bunche an optimist. It wasn’t wishful thinking but based on his hard work and “a long history of overcoming obstacles.”
Racism was ever-present in his life. By that time, Bunche had married and had kids. When the family dog died, he tried to take it to a local pet cemetery for burial. He was rebuffed and told to go to the cemetery for black people’s pets.
His travels gave him deep insight into racism outside the United States. Bunche was especially worried about how the Nazis in Germany used race to attack minorities. The rise of fascism was not only a threat to Europe, he believed. These poisonous ideas were a threat to Black Americans.
Bunche made an unusual move in 1941, taking a job at the Office of Strategic Services, later renamed the Central Intelligence Agency. He quickly moved on to the U.S. State Department, then to the United Nations (U.N.), where he wanted to help countries protect human rights, create peace, and uphold international law. He also believed he could advise nations newly free of colonialism on independence.
Bunche later described this as the hardest work he’d ever done.
Bunche’s intelligence, hard work, and deep knowledge brought him to the attention of the U.N.’s first Secretary-General, Trygve Lie. A Norwegian, Lie tasked Bunche with helping negotiate peace in the conflict between the emerging state of Israel and Palestine.
Jews persecuted during the Holocaust wanted an independent state in Palestine, which they believed had been promised to them by God. The Palestinians also dreamed of independence from the Ottoman Empire, which no longer existed. The challenge for Bunche was to help find a way for both to achieve independence and live in peace.
The work was exhausting and dangerous. Bunche helped set up the U.N.’s first peacekeeping force to separate the warring sides. The U.N. worried (rightly) that their planes and cars might be shot at (Zionist paramilitaries killed his boss, Count Folke Bernadotte), so Bunche ordered them painted white, a U.N. symbol of neutrality that persists to this day.
There was little pleasant about the work. “I talk, argue, coax, and threaten these stubborn people day and night, in the effort to reach agreement,” Bunche wrote his wife, Ruth.
Bunche relieved the tension by playing fierce rounds of table tennis.
Bunche prevailed. The 1949 Israel-Egypt Armistice Agreement ended the Arab–Israeli War and established what came to be known as the Green Line, which held for eighteen years. For that, the Nobel Committee awarded Bunche the 1950 Peace Prize. He was the first person of color chosen for this honor.
Bunche’s remarks at the award ceremony were humble. “Throughout the endless weeks of negotiations, I was bolstered by an unfailing sense of optimism. Somehow, I knew we had to succeed. I am an incurable optimist, as a matter of fact.”
Bunche later led peace negotiations in Yemen, Kashmir, and Cyprus, among other places.
If you keep up with the news, you’ll know that the conflict Bunche helped mediate remains one of the most violent and intractable in the world today. The 1967 war erased much of the GreenLine. Since Israel has set up thousands of illegal settlements in areas reserved for Palestinians and has enforced a brutal separation. Extremist Palestinian organizations have carried out acts of political violence.
Yet it’s also true that the work of diplomats, human rights defenders, and civil society is necessary for any hope of peace. As Bunche knew, the work is frustratingly slow, uncertain, and often heart-breaking. But modern-day Bunches work for peace around the world.
After he retired from the UN, Bunche returned to his first passion, civil rights for Black Americans. Bunche delivered a eulogy at the 1963 funeral of assassinated Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Bunche described Evers as a “brother, racially and in the cause of Negro liberation.”
On the plane back to New York, Bunche wrote, “The question in the minds of everyone at the funeral service was the question raised by Mrs. Evers herself: ‘Did Medgar Evers die in vain?’ The answer, I am sure, is that he did not. It is to be found in the determination and courage being demonstrated daily by the Negro citizens of Jackson and throughout the State of Mississippi as elsewhere in the country. It is to be found in the awakening of the National Administration to the true dimension and the moral level of this problem. It is to be found also in the fact that the overwhelming majority of the peoples and governments of the entire world are deeply in sympathy with the struggle being waged by the American Negro. The answer is firm and clear that this struggle will be won.”
While the world Bunche strove to create remains deeply troubled, his work made real advances in peace and the rights of formerly colonized and enslaved people. “Because I've seen so many instances of man's ability to do the right thing,” he once wrote, “I see them every day. If man can do these things, he can do better things.”
Book news
The publisher of Righting Wrongs is offering a giveaway through May 27. Please sign up and pass the word. Also, it helps to put books on your to-read list.
More news on The Bond Trilogy. Tammy Sparks at the (excellent) scifi and fantasy blog, Books, Bones and Buffy (follow her for great recommendations) hosted a cover reveal for Book 3, The Mother’s Wheel. Now all three are out and about in the world — and I couldn’t be more pleased with how they look and work together.
Pre-orders are so important so if you can, stick these books in your shopping basket.
Thank you for reading!