One of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary African Americans, Ralph Bunche rose through the ranks of academia as a brilliant political scientist during an era of entrenched racial discrimination, eventually serving in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and, later, in various leadership roles at the newly founded United Nations. In addition to telling Bunche’s life story through riveting historical footage—narrated by actor Sidney Poitier—William Greaves interviews scholars, politicians, and those who worked with Bunche to impart his sheer tenacity in spearheading the fight against segregation and racial violence in the United States, in overseeing postwar decolonization and an armistice between Israel and Egypt (for which he won the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize), and in staving off charges of Communist subversion during the McCarthy-era witch hunts. Widely considered the best of Greaves’s biographical documentaries, Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey offers a complex, multifaceted account of a man who labored ceaselessly in the name of diplomacy throughout several decades of national and international turmoil.