page_title: Ralph Bunche
section_title: Ancestry
hierarchical_section_title: Ralph Bunche / Ancestry
caption_attribution_description: Ralph J. Bunche House — 1221 E. 40th Place, South Los Angeles, California. 1908 Victorian bungalow was the boyhood (adolescent) home of Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche (1904-1971). Now housing the Ralph Bunche Peace &amp; Heritage Center — an interpretive museum and community center to promote peaceful interaction of all groups within South Central Los Angeles. A Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, and on the National Register of Historic Places in Los Angeles.
context_page_description: Ralph Johnson Bunche 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 and played a major role in numerous peacekeeping operations sponsored by the UN. In 1963, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President John F. Kennedy.
  Bunche served on the US delegation to both the Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization in 1944 and United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco in 1945 that drafted the UN charter. Bunche served on the American delegation to the first session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946. He then joined the UN as head of the Trusteeship Department, and began a long series of troubleshooting roles. In 1948 he became an acting mediator for the Middle East, negotiating an armistice between Egypt and Israel. For this success he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950.
context_section_description: Bunche was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1904 and baptized at the city's Second Baptist Church. His father Fred Bunche was a barber and his mother, Olive Agnes (née Johnson), was an amateur musician, from a "large and talented family." Her siblings included Charlie and Ethel Johnson.
  His maternal grandfather, Thomas Nelson Johnson, was mixed-race, the son of Eleanor Madden and her husband. Eleanor was the mixed-race daughter of an African-American slave mother and Irish planter father. Thomas Nelson Johnson graduated from Shurtleff College in Alton, Illinois in 1875, and then worked there as a teacher. In September 1875 he married Lucy Taylor, one of his students.
  Genealogist Paul Heinegg thinks that Fred Bunche (and Ralph) were probably descended from the South Carolina branch of the family but notes it has not been proven. He said that the censuses of 1900 and 1910 for Detroit "list several members of the Bunch family who were born in South Carolina, but Fred Bunch was not among them." He believes that Bunche was descended from Bunch ancestors established as free people of color in Virginia before the American Revolution. There were men of the Bunch surname in South Carolina by the end of the 18th century. The Bunch/Bunche surname was extremely rare.  Several generations of the Bunch men, free men of color, married white women colonists from the British Isles, who were free, so their children were free.
caption: Bunche's childhood home with his grandmother in South Los Angeles.
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