Ralph Bunche was born August 7, 1904, in Detroit, Michigan, and died December 9, 1971, in New York City. He was a U.S. diplomat, a key member of the United Nations for more than two decades, and recipient of the 1950 Nobel Prize for Peace for his successful negotiation of an Arab-Israeli truce in Palestine the previous year.
Bunche worked his way through the University of California at Los Angeles and graduated in 1927, during the time that the LACC campus was the site of UCLA before the university relocated to Westwood. He also earned graduate degrees in government and international relations at Harvard University (1928, 1934) and studied in England and South Africa.
During World War II, Bunche served in the U.S. War Department, the Office of Strategic Services and the State Department. He was active in the preliminary planning for the United Nations at the San Francisco Conference of 1945 and in 1947 joined the permanent UN Secretariat in New York as director of the new Trusteeship Department. He remained with the UN for many years and served in a number of important positions. Bunche also became active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s and participated in the 1965 civil rights marches in both Selma and Montgomery, Alabama. He also served as a board member for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for 22 years.