This is the first biography about Ralph J. Bunche, scholar, statesman, diplomat in the affairs of men, Nobel Peace Prize Winner in 1950.

Orphaned at 12, Grandma Johnson, tender, loving, wise, was his guiding spirit, his instigator for good, his inspiration for achievement. She was determined that he become a doctor or a lawyer and she managed things so that he went to college. He graduated from U.C.L.A. and was awarded a fellowship for graduate studies at Harvard University. There he received the Thayer Fellowship and offers of teaching posts at several all-white universities, but he preferred to teach political science at Howard University, the most famous Negro university in the country. Yes, Grandma Johnson's philosophy was deeply ingrained, for always she insisted on racial pride.

A Rosenwald Fellowship followed; then in 1936 he became co-director of the Institute of Race Relations at Swarthmore College, this in addition to his professorship at Howard University. A grant by the Social Science Research Council sent him off to Europe, South and East Africa, Malaya and the Netherland East Indies. He became an expert in anthropology and colonization and Chief of the African Section of the O.S.S. In 1944, Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, appointed him Territorial Specialist. Thus he became the first Negro in American history to take over a desk in the State Department. He attended the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, helped draw up the Charter of the United Nations. By Presidential appointment he became the U.S. Commissioner on Caribbean affairs, U.S. Commissioner to a conference of West Indian affairs.  Trygvie Lie appointed him Secretary of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine and here he proved his ability as a statesman and strategist, for he brought about the peace treaty between the Arabs and the Jews.

His title today in Undersecretary for Special Political Affairs. But he prefers plain Mr. Bunche, and despite all his achievements he remains a modest man, happy with his family and aware that there is still much to do in this life to attain the democratic ideals.

From the book

J. Alvin Kugelmass was working as a copy editor on a Washington, D.C. newspaper when the tinderbox that is the Middle East flared into the Arab-Israeli war. Daily, he handled Page 1 copy and wrote headlines that warned of threats to world peace, and that menaced the very existence of the infant United Nations—for if the untried U.N. could not meet its first, formidable challenge, it would collapse under the cynical onslaught of world opinion.

The name, Ralph J. Bunche, became vaguely familiar to him as wire copy flowed in from Jerusalem. But it wasn't until he moved to the copy desk of a New York newspaper that the name became a man and the man became a contemporary giant. Mr. Kugelmass began to use the name freely in headlines without fear that it could not be recognized.

Not long afterwards, Ralph Bunche was awarded the highest honor western civilization can grant to any man—The Nobel Prize for Peace. Mr. Kugelmass, abroad at the time on newspaper assignments, began to compile notes for a book on what to him was the mightiest challenge that can confront any man. As a newspaper man, Mr. Kugelmass saw the universal story beloved by all men, of the triumph over poverty, over gigantic insurmountables, and over fierce and undemocratic prejudice. "Everyone calls him 'my favorite hero'" Mr. Kugelmass says. "Here were all the elements of the epic and the ideal which had to be set down."

Author info taken from the book