Ralph Bunche Quotes
…Anything less than full equality is not enough. If we compromise on that principle our soul is dead
Ralph Bunche, 1904-1971, U. N. Undersecretary General, Nobel Laureate in Peace, “A Critical Analysis of the Tactics and Programs of Minority Groups”, Journal of Negro Education, July 1935.
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The reason this quotation is important, it was the first time in American history that a President had tied racial discrimination to morality. Before that other Presidents had argued against segregation on pragmatic grounds or on legal, Constitutional grounds. Kennedy’s private moral declaration had a huge impact on Black leaders throughout the country who heard about it by word of mouth. That statement forged a bond between JFK and Blacks while most whites did not see anything striking in the statement.
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Ralph Johnson Bunche was an American political scientist, diplomat, and leading actor in the mid-20th Century decolonization process and US civil rights movement, who received the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his late 1940s mediation in Israel. In the List of black Nobel laureates he is the first African American and first person of African descent to be awarded a Nobel Prize. He was involved in the formation and administration of the United Nations and played a major role in both the decolonization process and numerous peacekeeping operations sponsored by the UN. In 1963, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President John F. Kennedy. At the UN, Bunche gained such fame that Ebony magazine proclaimed him perhaps the most influential African American of the first half of the 20th Century and "[f]or nearly a decade, he was the most celebrated African American of his time both [in the US] and abroad."
