“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 United Nations 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.