One great value of a college educated community, is the further research that many go on to pursue as graduate and doctoral students. Besides the personal accomplishment of being recognized as a 'master or doctor of understanding' in a certain field, the collective of human awareness is enhanced when their research reveals wonderful new information that has long been ignored, buried, denied, or previously erroneously represented. We all receive a gift in having our understanding both 'cleansed' and expanded by their work.
An example for just such an experience awaits us in the new book reviewed below. Published in April 2010 I look forward to what new insights this group of scholars of UCLA's Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies has to say about the city of my birth.
Please check your local Black bookstore for this and other books that interest you. If not available, this book is also available from Amazon.
A brief detour here ~ The Center and building out of which this new book was produced is named for Dr. Ralph Bunche, an extraordinary individual, who was deeply rooted in and well loved in Los Angeles' Black community. Dr Bunche graduated from UCLA summa cum laude, valedictorian of his class, in 1927 majoring in international relations.
With a scholarship granted by Harvard, and a thousand dollars raised by the Black community, he went on to begin his graduate studies in political science at Harvard.
My heart's dream ~since I was very young ~ has always been to be an ambassador. I have always held Dr. Ralph Bunche as a personal role model. In my heart, Bunche has reigned as another one of those shining examples of the African American genius that emerged from Los Angeles, matured into a national treasure, and went on to command a world stage. Like those many others of his caliber (in different fields), despite the condoned and institutional ignorance and racism of the time, his great destiny, qualities and abilities were irrefutable and irrepresible. A consummate peacemaker and bringer of order and harmony, the arc of his life is a great example for anyone, feeling incapable of realizing their potential.
I include the biography that was presented when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, the first African American to earn this award, at the end of this post. If you're wondering why this is in PINK...it's simply that I love how I'm always inspired by the Life of Ralph Bunch.
Kentke
By Letisia Marquez April 21, 2010
California's anti–gay marriage intitiative Proposition 8 ignited a debate within Los Angeles' African American gay and lesbian communities: Should black same-sex couples come out to family and friends to help garner support for gay marriage, or should they continue to take a "don't ask, don't tell" approach?
"Some in the community were becoming more supportive of gay sexuality as an identity status that could exist alongside a strong racial-group affinity. Others were holding fast to religious and cultural ideologies that reduced gay sexuality to an immoral behavior and thus not a valid identity status," says Mignon R. Moore, a UCLA sociologist and professor of African American studies whose research — along with the work of more than two dozen other scholars — appears a new book that sheds light on black Los Angeles.
"Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities" (NYU Press, April 2010), co-edited by Darnell Hunt, director of UCLA's Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, and the center's assistant director, Ana-Christina Ramón, delves into the long and rich history of African Americans in Los Angeles and presents a snapshot of contemporary issues affecting the community.
"African Americans have played important and pivotal roles in Los Angeles' history," Hunt says. "As our book demonstrates, African Americans have had a powerful impact on the development of the city — from being part of the first settlers in 1781, through the period of the region's tremendous growth, to the present day."
"Black Los Angeles is and has always been a space of profound contradictions," Hunt writes in the book. "Just as Los Angeles has come to symbolize the complexities of the early twenty-first–century city, so too has Black Los Angeles come to embody the complex realities of race in so-called 'colorblind' times."
"Black Los Angeles" is the culmination of eight years of research the center conducted on African American communities in the region.
Hunt and Ramón were motivated to edit the book because they noticed a dearth of research that connected the dots between the past, present and future of black life in the Los Angeles. They met with scholars and community members to discuss what topics the book should include and then enlisted 23 experts to contribute chapters for the book.
"The chapters are interconnected by themes such as political participation, social justice, religious life, cultural production, and communities and neighborhoods, while individually featuring in-depth analyses of an issue or an episode in black Los Angeles," Ramón says. "We are proud to present a book that is both accessible and relevant to community members, students and scholars."
In the book's "Space" section, which deals with the history and geography of African Americans in Los Angeles, Paul Robinson, a geographer and assistant professor at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, notes that when El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de la Reina de Los Angeles — the Spanish town that would eventually become the city Los Angeles — was established in 1781, the majority of its original settlers (26 of 46) had African ancestry.
These original settlers came from areas that are now states in western Mexico, a region where the Spanish empire relied heavily on African and mulatto populations as soldiers and laborers in agriculture and mining. By 2008, nearly 950,000 African Americans lived in Los Angeles County, making it home to the second largest number of African Americans in the nation.
Although 6 percent of black residents left the county in the 1990s, many in search of more affordable housing and a safer environment for their families, the population grew by 1 percent between 2000 and 2008, Robinson notes. Black immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa and the Americas are spurring the growth.
"The African-origin population of Los Angeles has always been diverse, but never as diverse as it had become by the first decade of the 2000s," Robinson writes.
By 2008, there were an estimated 90,000 persons of sub-Saharan and/or Caribbean ancestry living in Los Angeles County, constituting nearly 10 percent of the county's total black population.
"As the county's non-native population grew throughout the decade, the diverse groups comprising it increasingly challenged common assumptions about the people and spaces comprising 'Black Los Angeles,'" Robinson writes.
Reginald Chapple, former president and CEO of the Dunbar Economic Development Corp. and a UCLA doctoral candidate in anthropology, recounts the development of Central Avenue from 1900 to 1950 as a center of African American culture and of Leimert Park Village, the current black enclave. And Andrew Deener, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, examines the rise and decline of Los Angeles' only black community by the sea, Oakwood, in the Venice area.
In the book's "People" section, Jooyoung Lee, a sociologist and postdoctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Health and Society Scholars program at the University of Pennsylvania, examines how some young black males in Los Angeles pursued careers in rapping as a means to economic opportunities that were otherwise absent in their communities.
Alex Alonso, a geographer and gang expert, writes about the influences that led to the rise of black gangs in Los Angeles. The ways in which black families cope with the incarceration of family members is explored by M. Belinda Tucker, a UCLA professor of psychiatry and biobehavorial sciences; Neva Pemberton, a UCLA doctoral candidate in education; Mary Weaver, executive director of Friends Outside in Los Angeles County; Gwendelyn Rivera, a UCLA doctoral student in education; and Carrie Petrucci, a senior research associate with EMT Associates Inc.
In the book's "Image" section, Nancy Wang Yuen, an assistant professor of sociology at Biola University, examines the lack of authentic roles for black actors in film and television; Paul Von Blum, a UCLA senior lecturer in African American studies and communication studies, writes about the rise of black art in Los Angeles after the Watts riots in 1965; and Scot Brown, a UCLA history professor, recounts the case of SOLAR, a black-owned record label that symbolized Los Angeles' rise as the media capital of black America in the latter decades of the 20th century.
The section also looks at the media attention focused on issues in the city's African American communities.
Hunt and Ramón, for example, examine Los Angeles Times' coverage of the controversial demise of Martin Luther King Jr./Charles Drew Medical Center. Dionne Bennett, an anthropologist and assistant professor of African American studies at Loyola Marymount University, writes about media misrepresentations of South Central Los Angeles and how certain films and television programs have contributed to stereotypical views of the area.
Interestingly, Bennett writes, residents had never referred to the area as South Central until the Watts riots of 1965. While there are various versions of how the term came to describe the area, it was officially used in the McCone Commission Report, a document that has been criticized for its superficial discussion of the complex events that shaped the riots, Bennett says.
"In the early twenty-first century, media images of South Central Los Angeles continued to label and limit African Americans," she writes. "These images usually omitted the educational, social and economic diversity of blacks not only in South Central, but throughout Black Los Angeles and ultimately Black America."
In the final section, "Action," Melina Abdullah, an associate professor of pan-African studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and Regina Freer, a professor of politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles, examine the rise of African American female leaders Charlotta Bass, a newspaper editor, publisher, activist and Progressive Party candidate for vice president in 1952, and former California Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, the first African American woman to serve as speaker of a state legislative body.
Sonya Winton, a political scientist and UCLA adjunct professor in African American studies, writes about a movement by the Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles to halt construction of a municipal solid-waste incinerator plant in the 1980s. And Hunt and Ramón recount the efforts of the Alliance for Equal Opportunity in Education to spur UCLA to adopt a revised admissions policy after it was reported that fewer than 100 African Americans enrolled as freshmen in 2006.
The book also includes a chapter on labor issues authored by Edna Bonacich, a professor emeritus of sociology and ethnic studies at UC Riverside; Lola Smallwood-Cuevas and Lanita Morris, labor organizers and project directors with the UCLA Labor Center; Steven C. Pitts, a labor policy specialist with the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education; and Joshua Bloom, a UCLA doctoral candidate in sociology.
The authors discuss the lack of employment opportunities among Los Angeles' African American working-age population. In 2000, 43 percent were unemployed, while 29 percent were employed in low-wage, dead-end jobs that offered neither retirement nor health benefits.
"It must be noted here that immigrants were not to blame for the crisis in the African American community," the authors write.
While there was indeed job competition between working-class black Angelenos and immigrants, the authors explain that global restructuring, de-industrialization, flexible production and the contracting of services out to independent contractors, in addition to crack and criminalization, were more fundamental causes.
The authors call for a black worker center for Los Angeles, which would aim to increase union membership, participation and leadership among African American workers in the area.
"(The center) would serve as a place to develop ideas for building an alternative economic development plan for Black Los Angeles as a whole," the authors note.
Ralph Johnson Bunche
August 7, 1904 - December 9,1971
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel.
Ralph Johnson Bunche (August 7, 1904-1971) 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.
His intellectual brilliance appeared early. He won a prize in history and another in English upon completion of his elementary school work and was the valedictorian of his graduating class at Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, where he had been a debater and all-around athlete who competed in football, basketball, baseball, and track. At the University of California at Los Angeles he supported himself with an athletic scholarship, which paid for his collegiate expenses, and with a janitorial job, which paid for his personal expenses. He played varsity basketball on championship teams, was active in debate and campus journalism, and was graduated in 1927, summa cum laude, valedictorian of his class, with a major in international relations.
With a scholarship granted by Harvard University and a fund of a thousand dollars raised by the black community of Los Angeles, Bunche began his graduate studies in political science. He completed his master's degree in 1928 and for the next six years alternated between teaching at Howard University and working toward the doctorate at Harvard.
The Rosenwald Fellowship, which he held in 1932-1933, enabled him to conduct research in Africa for a dissertation comparing French rule in Togoland and Dahomey. He completed his dissertation in 1934 with such distinction that he was awarded the Toppan Prize for outstanding research in social studies. From 1936 to 1938, on a Social Science Research Council fellowship, he did postdoctoral research in anthropology at Northwestern University, the London School of Economics, and Capetown University in South Africa.
Throughout his career, Bunche has maintained strong ties with education. He chaired the Department of Political Science at Howard University from 1928 until 1950; taught at Harvard University from 1950 to 1952; served as a member of the New York City Board of Education (1958-1964), as a member of the Board of Overseers of 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.
Bunche has always been active in the civil rights movement. At Howard University he was considered by some as a young radical intellectual who criticized both America's social system and the established Negro organizations, but generally he is thought of as a moderate. From his experience as co-director of the Institute of Race Relations at Swarthmore College in 1936, added to his firsthand research performed earlier, he wrote A World View of Race (1936). He participated in the Carnegie Corporation's well-known survey of the Negro in America, under the direction of the Swedish sociologist,
Gunnar Myrdal, which resulted in the publication of Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944).
He was a member of the «Black Cabinet» consulted on minority problems by Roosevelt's administration; declined President Truman's offer of the position of assistant secretary of state because of the segregated housing conditions in Washington, D. C.; helped to lead the civil rights march organized by
Martin Luther King, Jr., in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965; supported the action programs of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and of the Urban League. Bunche has not himself formed organizations, nor has he aspired to positions of administrative leadership in existing civil rights organizations. Rather, he has exerted his influence personally in speeches and publications, especially during the twenty-year period from 1945 to 1965.
His message has been clear: Racial prejudice is an unreasoned phenomenon without scientific basis in biology or anthropology; «segregation and democracy are incompatible»; blacks should maintain the struggle for equal rights while accepting the responsibilities that come with freedom; whites must demonstrate that «democracy is color-blind»2.
Ralph Bunche's enduring fame arises from his service to the U. S. government and to the UN. An adviser to the Department of State and to the military on Africa and colonial areas of strategic military importance during World War II, Bunche moved from his first position as an analyst in the Office of Strategic Services to the desk of acting chief of the Division of Dependent Area Affairs in the State Department. He also discharged various responsibilities in connection with international conferences of the Institute of Pacific Relations, the UN, the
International Labor Organization, and the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission.
In 1946, UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie «borrowed» Bunche from the State Department and placed him in charge of the Department of Trusteeship of the UN to handle problems of the world's peoples who had not yet attained self-government. He has been associated with the UN ever since.
From June of 1947 to August of 1949, Bunche worked on the most important assignment of his career - the confrontation between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. He was first appointed as assistant to the UN Special Committee on Palestine, then as principal secretary of the UN Palestine Commission, which was charged with carrying out the partition approved by the UN General Assembly.
In early 1948 when this plan was dropped and fighting between Arabs and Israelis became especially severe, the UN appointed Count Folke Bernadotte as mediator and Ralph Bunche as his chief aide. Four months later, on September 17, 1948, Count Bernadotte was assassinated, and Bunche was named acting UN mediator on Palestine. After eleven months of virtually ceaseless negotiating, Bunche obtained signatures on armistice agreements between Israel and the Arab States.
Bunche returned home to a hero's welcome. New York gave him a «ticker tape» parade up Broadway; Los Angeles declared a «Ralph Bunche Day ». He was besieged with requests to lecture, was awarded the Spingarn Prize by the NAACP in 1949, was given over thirty honorary degrees in the next three years, and the Nobel Peace Prize for 1950.Bunche still works for the UN. From 1955 to 1967, he served as undersecretary for Special Political Affairs and since 1968 has been undersecretary-general. During these years he has taken on many special assignments.
When war erupted in the Congo in 1960,
Dag Hammarskjöld, then secretary-general of the UN, appointed him as his special representative to oversee the UN commitments there. He has shouldered analogous duties in Cyprus, Kashmir, and Yemen.Replying to an interviewer on the UN's intervention in international crises, Bunche remarked that the «United Nations has had the courage that the League of Nations lacked - to step in and tackle the buzz saw»
3.
Ralph Bunche has supplied a part of that courage.4
Selected Bibliography
Bennett, Lerone, Jr., Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America. 4th ed. Chicago, Johnson Publishing Co., 1969.
Bunche, Ralph J., Extended Memorandum on the Programs, Ideologies, Tactics and Achievements of Negro Betterment and Interracial Organizations. A research memorandum for use in the preparation of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma. Original typescript (1940) deposited in New York Public Library; microfilm copies made in 1968 available in the libraries of the Universities of Illinois, Iowa, and California at Berkeley.
Bunche, Ralph J., French Administration in Togoland and Dahomey. Ph.D.dissertation. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Graduate School, 1934.
Bunche, Ralph J., «Human Relations and World Peace», in Gustavus Adolphus College Bulletin, 17 (1950). An address given at Gustavus Adolphus College (St. Peter, Minn.) Commencement and Bernadotte Memorial Dedication, June 4, 1950.
Bunche, Ralph J., «My Most Unforgettable Character», Reader's Digest, 95 (September, 1969) 45 - 49.
Bunche, Ralph J., Native Morale in The Netherlands East Indies. Washington, D.C., U.S. Department of State for the Library of Congress, 1941.
Bunche, Ralph J., «Peace and Human Progress», in Symposium on World Cooperation and Social Progress. New York, League for Industrial Democracy, 1951.
Bunche, Ralph J., «Peace and the United Nations», the Montague Burton Lecture on International Relations. Leeds, England, University of Leeds, 1952.
Bunche, Ralph J., «United Nations Intervention in Palestine», in Colgate Lectures in Human Relations, 1949. Hamilton, N.Y., Colgate University, 1949.
Bunche, Ralph J., «What America Means to Me», as told to Irwin Ross. The American Magazine, 149 (February, 1950) 19, 122-126. Reprinted in Negro Digest (September, 1950).
Bunche, Ralph J., A World View of Race. Washington, D.C., Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936. Reissued, Port Washington, N.Y., Kennikat Press, 1968.
Flynn, James J., «Ralph Johnson Bunche: Statesman», in Negroes of Achievement in Modern America. New York, Dodd, Mead, 1970.
Hughes, Langston, «Ralph Bunche: Statesman and Political Scientist», in Famous American Negroes. New York, Dodd, Mead, 1954.
Italiaander, Rolf, Die Friedensmacher: Drei Neger erhielten den Friedens-Nobelpreis. Kassel, W. Germany, Oncken, 1965.
Brief biographies of Bunche, King, and Luthuli.
Kugelmass, J. Alvin, Ralph J. Bunche: Fighter for Peace. New York, Julian Messner, 1952.
Myrdal, Gunnar, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York, Harper, 1944.
Phifer, Gregg, «Ralph Bunche: Negro Spokesman», in American Public Address, ed. by Loren Reid. Columbia, Mo., University of Missouri Press, 1961.
1. Bunche pays tribute to this «matriarch» of the family in an autobiographical fragment in Reader's Digest, «My Most Unforgettable Character».
2. See Gregg Phifer, «Ralph Bunche: Negro Spokesman», passim.
3. «Crisis», in The New Yorker, 43 (July 29, 1967) 23.
4.
Suffering from heart disease and diabetes, Mr. Bunche resigned as UN undersecretary-general on October 1, 1971. He died on December 9, 1971.
From
Nobel Lectures, Peace 1926-1950, Editor Frederick W. Haberman, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1972
It was later edited and republished in
Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
Ralph Bunche died on December 9, 1971.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1950
