Ralph J. Bunche: “The Barriers of Race Can Be Surmounted” (1949)
“The Barriers of Race Can Be Surmounted”—Ralph J. Bunche’s commencement address to the graduating class at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, on May 30, 1949—is perhaps the most personal speech this normally private man ever made. Weeks earlier, after eighty-one days of nonstop negotiations on the Greek island of Rhodes, Bunche, the chief UN mediator for Palestine, successfully secured armistice agreements from the state of Israel and the Arab states of Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, bringing an end to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The Palestine Accords, as these agreements were known, earned Bunche international acclaim for bringing peace to the Middle East. In the United States the accords were seen as yet another triumph for a highly respected national figure, an African American whose career as a scholar and public servant had made him, at age forty-five, one of the most distinguished Americans of his generation.
In recognition of his public service, Fisk...
