Alb. Teacher Helped Set Nobel Laureate on Path to Success
By Toby Smith
Journal Staff Writer
The little adobe with the plum tree in the side yard and the plinking piano in the front window is no longer there. Same with the dusty schoolhouse around the corner, where the boy did time. Gone too is a teacher in that school, a firm but wise woman who rapped the boy's knuckles with a ruler but then showed him a window he didn't know existed.
All are part of the past now, like last week's wind.
What's left are pieces from that time, and from later years, when the boy, then a man, realized how important that house, that school, that teacher were to his life, to the world.
Spitballs, special care
The boy who lived for a year and a half in the little adobe on North Fifth Street was Ralph Johnson Bunche. He had come with his family, then known as Bunch, to Albuquerque from Detroit in 1915 when he was 11. That was a time of horse-drawn carts and high-button shoes.
The boy's father, Fred, was an out-of-work barber who had led his brood— his wife, Olive, her brother, Charlie, Ralph and Ralph's kid sister, Grace— here and there, looking for a decent wage, combating racial lopsidedness, struggling to survive.
They landed in Albuquerque because Olive had tuberculosis, as did Charlie, and this city was a major hub for those chasing the cure, as TB treatment was then known.
Eventually the family settled Downtown, in the little adobe, and that fall, Ralph, wide-eyed and handsome under a newsboy cap, enrolled in sixth grade at the Fourth Ward School on Sixth Street.
His teacher was Emma Belle Sweet, called Miss Sweet by all. Proper as a Puritan, Miss Sweet had begun her teaching career in an abandoned saloon south of Santa Fe.
A dreamer when he arrived in Albuquerque, Ralph Bunch had little interest in school. Belle Sweet changed that, though not without difficulty. Young Ralph talked up a tornado and launched spitballs.
"Ralph Bunch," Miss Sweet doubtless said, her voice barely elevated, "please stop it."
When he didn't, she told him to stand in a corner with his nose against the wall. Sometimes she had to smack the back of his hand.
The punishment was delivered out of concern, not anger, for Miss Sweet surely saw something in the boy. In time, she got Ralph to read regularly, to study, to consider what lay beyond the Sandias. Geography, after all, was her specialty.
Belle Sweet likely knew that Ralph Bunch's life away from school was not easy. Blacks in Albuquerque back then, even light-skinned blacks like Ralph Bunch, were quite rare. And she probably knew that a cruel disease stared square at his mother and uncle. And that his father, Fred, had taken off again, for good this time.
Maybe Ralph Bunch's struggles reminded Belle Sweet of her own. When she was a girl, her father died trying to save others in a whirling flood near Las Vegas, N.M. Forced to go to work at 14, she found a teaching spot in tiny Dolores, a gold-mining camp near Cerrillos. The one-time taproom there had dirt floors, black-painted door slats for a blackboard and, for desks, fruit crates. She was paid $21 a year.
Olden days, golden moments
In 1916, when relatives in Detroit shipped Olive her piano, music suddenly filled the little house on North Fifth Street. A frail woman, Olive battled crippling rheumatic fever in addition to tuberculosis. But when she played her pie-anna, her spirits and those around her soared.
Uncle Charlie, a big-hearted fellow who had trouble making a living himself, often sang along as his sister played, for instance, "I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now." When not job-hunting, Charlie liked to take Ralph to the east mesa, up past the University of New Mexico. There they hunted quail and jackrabbits, which Olive broiled in butter while her diners hovered like gulls over a fishing boat.
Those were happy times indeed, as Bunche later recollected. When the weather warmed in the spring of 1916, he swam in irrigation ditches, or went with his mother, who had to take the trolley because she hobbled, to band concerts in Old Town.
Meanwhile, Ralph continued to learn from Belle Sweet. Though his cutting up earned him a C-plus in "deportment," his other grades climbed. "It's never too late to change," Miss Sweet told him. She knew of what she spoke. After years of teaching at small stops in New Mexico, relying only on an eighth-grade education, she went back to school for her high school diploma. Even after she began teaching in Albuquerque in 1913, it took her 15 years to get a bachelor's degree from UNM. Through all this her education credo never varied: Build self-respect in every pupil. Humiliate no one.
A brush with bias
Though an invalid, Ralph's mother had been taught to stand up for her race. Olive's mother, Lucy Johnson, the daughter of a slave, had fought racial prejudice all her life, and she inoculated her daughter with a We-bow-to-no-one attitude. Olive in turn passed it on to Ralph.
One afternoon in Albuquerque, mother and son went to the Busy Bee Theater, a nickelodeon on Central Avenue. They had just taken their seats when an usher appeared and told them, "You've got to move to the back row."
Olive shook her head. When the usher saw she wasn't going to budge, he finally went away.
As good as things got in the little adobe house, Fred Bunch's absence started to wear on his wife and, in time, her health declined. Tuberculosis did that to people back then. Just when you thought you had caught the cure, TB had a way of suddenly turning and laughing in your face.
On a February night in 1917, Olive took to her bed with an unbreakable fever. When she asked for a glass of milk, Ralph told her there was none. That response haunted him for the rest of his life: He had drunk all the milk himself.
By morning, Olive Bunch was dead. She was 35.
During services at Albuquerque's Fairview Cemetery, Ralph's sister, Grace, wailed inconsolably and refused to leave her mother's grave. Gently, Ralph took her arm and walked her away.
With his father out of the picture and his mother gone, Ralph Bunch, at age 12, was an orphan.
To help make a life for himself and Uncle Charlie, Ralph took a job at the Home Bakery on First Street where, stripped to the waist in front of a 400-degree oven, he often labored till midnight.
Could things get worse? Oh, yes. One night, the much-loved Uncle Charlie walked home from the Santa Fe yards, where he had finally hired on as a brakeman. Caught in a cold rain, Charlie got soaked. His TB started to laugh.
Despondent about the turn of his health as well as his sister's death three months before, Charlie put the business end of his hunting shotgun to his head and squeezed.
Soon after, Ralph was sent to live with his grandmother in California, where his family's surname was officially changed to Bunche.
Over the next 40 years, astonishing things would happen to the youngster from North Fifth Street. Beyond most expectations, Ralph Bunche excelled in education, international diplomacy and upholding civil rights. He negotiated with world-renowned figures, received more than 50 honorary doctorates and, as a Nobel Peace Prize winner, accepted global applause.
Teacher of the year
Belle Sweet, a private woman who loved pets and collecting stamps, retired in 1948 after 37 years spent in Albuquerque classrooms, 54 in all.
Miss Sweet never married; students were her family. In the rooms she rented on Edith Boulevard, she filled scrapbooks with news of her former charges.
Periodically, Ralph Bunche came to Albuquerque to visit his mother's grave. During a 1952 trip, Bunche looked up his old teacher. Together they went to Lew Wallace Elementary School, which now stood where the Fourth Ward School had.
"Sure has changed," Bunche said.
Miss Sweet nodded.
Ten years later, Bunche gave Belle Sweet the honor of a lifetime. She flew to New York City for a tour of the United Nations, where Bunche had carved an acclaimed career as the U.N.'s undersecretary. Upon arrival in the city, Miss Sweet apologized, remarking, "My Albuquerque hairdresser made me look like Grandma Moses."
Bunche quickly arranged for a redo at her hotel, the Waldorf-Astoria.
From New York Miss Sweet traveled to Atlantic City, N.J., where, in front of 2,000 onlookers, Bunche presented her with the Golden Key Award, in which a notable American annually named his most influential teacher.
After handing her a plaque and a check, Bunche said, "She was the first to open up a world beyond. When she spoke to us, we knew she was taking a personal interest. I've never met a nicer lady, nor one more appropriately named."
In 1968, Belle Sweet died in an Albuquerque nursing home. She was 89.
After enduring myriad medical problems, Ralph Bunche died three years later in a New York hospital. He was 67.
Parks, schools and college buildings across the country now bear Bunche's name.
He would be 100 this year, though some records list his birth as 1903.
A final assignment
Belle Sweet said she looked at all former students the same way, no matter how they turned out. But clearly she was most moved by how far Ralph Bunche had traveled. And that he had remembered her, a wispy schoolmarm, well, that undoubtedly stunned her. For goodness sakes, Miss Sweet told friends, Ralph Bunche had studied at Harvard. Surely he met some important teachers there.
If he had, none inspired him more than she.
A white woman born in the rural Midwest not long after the Civil War, Belle Sweet could have grown up bigoted. Instead, she grew up frugal and kind. After her death, it was found that she had set up a trust fund to specifically help black churches in the Albuquerque area.
To Mount Olive Baptist Church, where Ralph Bunche had gone as a boy, she left $1,000.
It was the sum she had received for winning the Golden Key Award.
A Ralph Bunche Legacy
- 1904: born, Detroit, Mich.
- 1915-1917: resident Albuquerque
- 1922: valedictorian, Jefferson High School, Los Angeles, first black to hold honor
- 1927: A.B. University of California, Los Angeles, Phi Beta Kappa; star of basketball team, first black to be valedictorian
- 1928: M.A. Harvard; Ph.D., 1934. First black to earn Harvard doctorate in government and international relations
- 1933-38: professor, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
- 1941-46: analyst, Office of Strategic Services; adviser, U.S. State Department
- 1947: named undersecretary general, United Nations, highest U.S. official, black or white, at U.N.
- 1950: winner, Nobel Peace Prize, for designing Mideast accord between new state of Israel and Arab states
- 1950s-1960s: led U.N. peacekeeping efforts in Suez, Congo and Cyprus
- 1963: awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom, highest civilian honor bestowed on American
- 1965: participated in civil rights marches in Montgomery and Selma, Ala.
- 1971: died, New York City
Albuquerque is unlike any other city. That's often why people choose to live here. "ABQ Close-up" periodically explores the singularity of the city and, in doing so, attempts to show what makes its people and places distinctive.
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