Ralph Johnson Bunche (August 7, 1904 – December 9, 1971) was an American political scientist, academic, and diplomat who received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his late 1940s mediation in Israel. He was the first African American to be so honored. He was involved in the formation and administration of the United Nations. In 1963, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President John F. Kennedy.

For more than two decades (1928 to 1950), Bunche served as chair of the Department of Political Science at Howard University, where he also taught generations of students. He served as a member of the Board of Overseers of his alma mater, Harvard University (1960–1965), as a member of the board of the Institute of International Education, and as a trustee of Oberlin College, Lincoln University, and New Lincoln School.

In August 2008, the United States National Archives and Records Administration made public the fact that Bunche had joined the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – the precursor organization to the Central Intelligence Agency – during World War II.

• From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Bunche, accessed 8 February 2019.

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Ralph Johnson Bunche was born in Detroit, Michigan. His father, Fred Bunche, was a barber in a shop having a clientele of whites only; his mother, Olive (Johnson) Bunche, was an amateur musician; his grandmother, «Nana» Johnson, who lived with the family, had been born into slavery. When Bunche was ten years old, the family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the hope that the poor health of his parents would improve in the dry climate. Both, however, died two years later. His grandmother, an indomitable woman who appeared Caucasian «on the outside» but was «all black fervor inside»1, took Ralph and his two sisters to live in Los Angeles. Here Ralph contributed to the family's hard pressed finances by selling newspapers, serving as house boy for a movie actor, working for a carpet-laying firm, and doing what odd jobs he could find.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1950/bunche-...