A Hero Misread and Unsung
MEYER, KARL E.
A Hero Misread and Unsung Ralph Bunche: An American Life By Brian Urquhart Norton. 496 pp. $27.50. Reviewed by Karl E. Meyer Member, New York "Times" editorial board HIS WAS a storybook...
...I will not run away from it by pursuing an escapist fantasy of an all-black road to an all-black society...
...In part, Bunche's obscurity is no doubt due to his choice of career...
...Little more need be said," was how Bunche began his speech a year later in Montgomery, on the steps of the Alabama statehouse...
...On returning to the United States, Bunche caught the attention of the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, who was just embarking on his pathbreaking study, The American Dilemma...
...Ralph Bunche deserves better from his country, and his people...
...In 1927, as a student at UCLA (he led the basketball team to three successive titles), Bunche was awarded a graduate scholarship to Harvard...
...And he abhorred separatist ghettos, as in his characteristic 1968 declaration in Los Angeles: "I am a Negro, but I am also an American...
...The truth was emphatically otherwise...
...In a succession of prophetic statements, he deplored the widening gap in America between haves and have-nots...
...No movies or documentaries have celebrated his achievements...
...There he studied colonialism and made his home a center for successful future rebels like Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta and relentless radicals like Robeson, whose estrangement from America he understood but did not share...
...With his fame as a gifted UN troubleshooter growing, he lent his prestige to the "long overdue" civil rights uprising at home...
...Yet since his death in 1971 Ralph Bunche has been virtually forgotten...
...He was among the speakers at the Lincoln Memorial Rally in 1963, immortalized by King's greatest address...
...I will not give up my legacy in this society willingly...
...But I fear the more basic reason for his largely dropping from sight is that Bunche is dismissed by many American blacks as too moderate, and as an establishment figure...
...Following a stint in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), he joined the planning group that drafted the UN Charter...
...Scarcely the words of an effete diplomat...
...He immediately wrote to W.E.B...
...Indeed, Myrdal's essential theme was anticipated by Bunche in World View of Race (1936): "No other subject can so well illustrate the insincerity of our doctrines of human equality and the great disparity between our political theory and our social practice as that of race...
...Bunche was instrumental in securing language that committed the new World Organization to speeding the end of colonialism...
...Reviewed by Karl E. Meyer Member, New York "Times" editorial board HIS WAS a storybook life: The first African-American to win a Nobel Prize, he was a college athlete who excelled as a scholar at Harvard and Howard, an international peacemaker who marched for civil rights in Alabama, a negotiator who drafted the language in the United Nations Charter that freed millions of colonial subjects...
...All of this belongs to me as much as it belongs to any American with a white skin...
...This is my country...
...This misreads his own beliefs...
...Add to these circumstances Bunche's refusal to indulge in the great American game of shameless self-advertisement...
...After Pearl Harbor, in that same militant spirit, Bunche took part in the agitation that brought about a Federal fair employment code...
...My ancestors helped to create it, to build it, to make it strong and rich...
...By God, we are here...
...On the island of Rhodes, defying the odds, he negotiated the armistice that ended the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948...
...As his leading collaborator, Bunche traveled with the Swede through the Deep South in 1940, sleeping in separate hotels and courting arguments or worse when Myrdal, often with ignorant rashness, challenged Jim Crow...
...He shrugged off acclaim and even tried to decline his Nobel Prize, which he was directed to accept by his then chief, Secretary General Trygve Lie...
...Bunche's path led to Howard University, where he shaped the Department of Government in the 1930s, and then to the London School of Economics...
...And this admirable biography by Brian Urquhart, his successor as UN Undersecretary General for Political Affairs, has received at best token attention...
...It also suggests that glory is reserved for those who are murdered by racists, like Martin Luther King Jr., or seen as victims of white hypocrisy, like Adam Clayton Powell Jr., or who lost faith in the remedial possibilities of American democracy, like Malcolm X or Paul Robeson...
...True to Bunche's own vision, American Dilemma, published just 50 years ago, was a devastating exposure of democracy's failings, but not a rejection of American values...
...A computer search of 15 major U.S...
...newspapers from 1983 to 1993 showed that he was mentioned, mostly in passing, in less than 50 articles...
...He proudly described himself as an international civil servant, not exactly a calling that lends itself to celebrity...
...I saw not a single reference to him during African-American History Month...
...What is mine I intend to have and to hold, to fight, if necessary, to hold it...
...Du Bois, the great militant and first African-American to earn a Harvard PhD: "Since I have been sufficiently old to think rationally and to appreciate that there is a 'race problem' in America, in which I was necessarily involved, I have set as the goal of my ambition service to my group...
...Thus Urquhart's biography, drawing on family papers, not only redresses neglect but will surprise those who assume that Bunche won his laurels by accommodation to white superiors, while remaining aloof from the turbulent civil rights struggles of the 1960s...
Vol. 77 • March 1994 • No. 3
