Day 3: December 9, 1971

American diplomat Ralph Bunche, winner of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize, died on December 9, 1971 in New York City.

Bunche was born in Detroit, Michigan on August 7, 1904. In the time between earning graduate degrees in government and international relations at Harvard University, he established a department of political science at Howard University in Washington, D.C. in 1928. Between 1938 and 1940, he collaborated with Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal on the monumental study of U.S. race relations published as An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). The study is famous for presenting the theory that poverty breeds poverty.

During World War II, Bunche worked for the War Department and the State Department. Toward the end of the war, he played an important role in preliminary planning for the United Nations, the organization he served for the rest of his career.

After the chief U.N. mediator between the warring factions in Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated, Bunche, then an aide on a special U.N. committee to negotiate an end to the first Arab-Israeli War, was thrust into a leading role in the process. His successful negotiation of a 1949 truce between the parties earned him the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1950.

Bunche later oversaw U.N. peacekeeping missions to the Suez Canal in 1956, the Congo in 1960, and Cyprus in 1964. Bunche served as a board member for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for 22 years. In the last decade of his life, he became an increasingly vocal supporter of the civil rights movement in the United States, participating in the 1965 civil rights marches in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama.