Home / Full timeline / Arthur B. Spingarn, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) president since 1940, and Ralph J. Bunche, Undersecretary General of the United Nations, Nobel Peace Prize winner, scholar, and civil rights activist, both die in the last month of the year.
Arthur B. Spingarn, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) president since 1940, and Ralph J. Bunche, Undersecretary General of the United Nations, Nobel Peace Prize winner, scholar, and civil rights activist, both die in the last month of the year.
1971 (Dec)
Two veteran champions of civil rights died before the close of the year. Arthur B. Spingarn, the NAACP's president since 1940, succumbed at his home in New York at age ninety-three. Spingarn, a white civil rights lawyer, once headed the NAACP's National Legal Committee. The NAACP's annual meritorious award, the Spingarn Medal, was named in honor of the long-time civil rights leader. NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins eulogized Spingarn as one who had challenged the sanctioned institutions of Jim Crow and characterized his death as a great loss to the Blacks in particular and the liberal social movement in general. Ralph J. Bunche, Undersecretary General of the United Nations, Nobel peace prize winner, scholar, and civil rights activist, died at age sixty-seven in New York. Bunche, who was a familiar figure in international councils as well as on civil rights battlefields and was a key figure in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, was eulogized by United Nations Secretary General U Thant as an international institution in his own right.
References:
- • Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African-American History: Significant Events and People from 1619 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995.