Added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 22, 1978

Were it not for the sign posted outside and a small plaque mounted next to the front door, you wouldn’t know that the house at 1221 East 40th Place was any more significant than the other unremarkable single-story homes in the neighborhood. It’s a simple Victorian bungalow, built around 1910, with shiplap siding and little adornment, converted into a duplex at some point.  

And yet for eight years, it housed the great Ralph J. Bunche. A respected diplomat and UN official, Bunche is well known for negotiating an end to hostilities in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The feat earned him the distinction as the first African-American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1950.

This house was Bunche’s home from 1919 to 1927, a formative period of his life. He had moved to South LA with his grandmother, aunts, uncle and siblings at the age of 14, not long after his mom died. He distinguished himself as a debater and all-around athlete at Jefferson High School, where he was valedictorian of his class. He took top marks at UCLA too (back when the campus was on Vermont Ave., where LACC now stands), graduating summa cum laude in 1927, and then took off for Harvard thanks to a scholarship and a $1000 fund raised by the local Black community. Even after he left, he considered the house on 40th Place (then called East 37th Street) his home, at least until he married Ruth Harris in 1930. 

Ralph Bunche would become the first Black man in America to earn a Ph.D. in Political Science. He collaborated with sociologist Gunnar Myrdal on the influential study on race relations An American Dilemma. He worked in intelligence during WWII and held top positions in the State Department, one of the first Black men to do so. He was part of the US delegation that helped to form the United Nations in 1945, and after he joined the UN full time, he spent the next 25 years mediating geopolitical crises in Suez, the Near East, the Congo, Bahrain, India and Pakistan and more. 

Bunche developed a unique outlook on civil rights, as an academic who understood the complex history of colonial race relations, a government official who witnessed the politics behind the progress and a Black man who had endured discrimination throughout his life. So it’s no wonder that back home in the US, he was a champion for the rights of Black Americans and counted Martin Luther King, Jr. as one of his many admirers. In 2003, UCLA renamed their Center for Afro-American Studies as the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, in honor of their alumnus on the centenary of his birth. 

The Ralph Bunche House remained in the Bunche family until the mid-1970s. It was vacant for a decade and declared a “nuisance property,” until the nonprofit Dunbar Economic Development Corp. bought the property in 1996, beginning an eight-year-long saga to raise funds to fix it up. The Ralph Bunche Peace and Heritage Center finally opened in 2004, and operated as both a museum and the home base for the Ralph Bunche Youth Leadership Academy. The transformation earned the project a Preservation Award from the LA Conservancy in 2006. The home is now privately owned. 

This is one of four of Bunche’s residences listed on the National Register of Historic Places. There’s also a Virginia high school and a historic district in Kentucky that bear his name, both on the NRHP. None of us can predict how we will be judged by history. But if we use his NRHP all-star status as a proxy, it’s a pretty good indication that history has already deemed Bunche as one of the worthiest Americans of his era.

I’d also argue that the Ralph Bunche House is a prime example of how a building that may not be important architecturally can, through adaptive reuse, continue to serve an important purpose and tell important stories of the people who lived there. Historic preservation is about so much more than just retaining physical spaces. It’s also about honoring their relevance to future generations.

Recommended Reading/Listening: 

+Ralph J. Bunche House’s NRHP nomination form

+Ralph J. Bunche House (Los Angeles Conservancy)

+Ralph Bunche Biographical (NobelPrize.org)

+Ralph Bunche’s legacy: In his own words (UCLA.edu, 2019)

+No. 159 – Ralph J. Bunche Home (Big Orange Landmarks, 2008)

+On and Off Central Ave. (LA Times, 2006)

+Ralph Bunche Peace and Heritage Center Opens (LA Times, 2004)

+Riordan Cuts Red Tape to Begin Restoration of Nobelist’s Home (LA Times, 1999)

+Ralph Bunche: Nana Lit the Beacons (This I Believe podcast, 2018)