The Northwest Enterprise

By RICHARD B. GEHMAN

Ralph Johnson Bunche, a soft-voiced patient, apparently indefatigable ex-college professor of forty-four, easily ranks among the top half dozen diplomats in America and possibly in the world. As the first United States Negro ever to become a leader in international affairs, he is a living demonstration that the processes of democracy can and do work. At the same time, he is a living challenge to democracy to work better.

Dr. Bunche's performance as Acting Mediator for the U.N. in the recent peace mission to Palestine was the climax to a career that reads like a present-day parallel to Booker T. Washington's famous Up from Slavery. His grandmother, who raised him from the age of ten, was born in bondage. He took menial jobs to work his way through public schools and college, and ultimately won his Ph.D. at Harvard.

The man who mediated for peace in the Middle East's powder keg of racial hatred has lived all his life in the shadow of Jim Crow. Highly successful personally and a brilliant United Nations official, he has fought for equality of opportunity regardless of race, and he has won. Doctor Bunche is the kind of man who makes democracy work.

-By Drew Pearson.

Today he is recognized as one of the foremost authorities on colonial peoples and their problems; his work in O.S.S. aided in preparing for the successful invasion of North Africa in World War II, and he drafted much of the three chapters on trusteeship and colonies in the U.N. Charter. He won this year's American Association for the United Nations award, was cited by the One World Award Committee, and has been mentioned in newspapers as a candidate for the Nobel peace prize. Few Americans of any complexion can boast a similar record of scholarship and statesmanship.

Despite his distinguished background Dr. Bunche has lived constantly in the shadow of Jim Crow. Time and again he has been refused service in or admittance to restaurants, not only in Southern cities, but also in Los Angeles (his adopted home town), Seattle and Washington, D. C.

Bigotry like this might conceivably someday deprive the nation of the full potentiality of his proven diplomatic abilities.

Soon after returning from Palestine last April, Dr. Bunche was mentioned by a State Department official as a likely appointee for a newly created job: Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and African Affairs. When questioned, he told friends that he knew nothing more about this than what he read in the papers, but added that in any event he was not inclined to return to government service in Washington--in part, at least, because of his unwillingness to re-expose his family to anti-Negro conditions there.

The doctor clarified his position recently while relaxing on a couch in his small apartment in Parkway Village, the U.N. housing project on Long Island, New York, to which he and his family moved from Washington nearly two years ago.

"Frankly," he said, "there's too much Jim Crow in Washington for me. I wouldn't take my kids back there."

(His two daughters, Joan, seventeen, and Jane, fifteen, attend a Friends school in Westown, Pennsylvania; Ralph, Jr., five, goes to kindergarten at Lake Success.)

Colliers Magazine, June 11. Read the whole story-a remarkable article.