family again after Ohio and had not been "a good provider." But he followed them when they moved to New Mexico. Because of the declining health of his mother and uncle, the family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1915. His mother, "'a musically inclined woman who contributed much to what her son called a household “bubbling over with ideas and opinions'", died in 1917, and his uncle shortly thereafter. Thereafter, Bunche was raised by Ralph with his maternal grandmother, Lucy Taylor Johnson, whom he credited with instilling in him his pride in his race and his self-belief. In 1918, Lucy Taylor Johnson moved with the two Bunche grandchildren to the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles. Fred Bunche later remarried, and Ralph never saw him again. Bunche was a brilliant student, a debater, athlete and the valedictorian of his graduating class at Jefferson High School. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1927 as the valedictorian of his class. Using the money his community raised for his studies and a graduate scholarship at Harvard University, he earned a doctorate in political science. Academic career Bunche earned a master's degree in political science in 1928 and a doctorate in 1934, while he was already teaching in the Department of Political Science at Howard University, a historically black college. At the time, it was typical for doctoral candidates to start teaching before completion of their dissertations. He was the first African American to gain a PhD in political science from an American university. Bunche's 1934 dissertation, "French Administration in Togoland and Dahomey", won the Toppan Prize for the best dissertation on comparative politics in Department of Government at Harvard University. From 1936 to 1938, Ralph Bunche studied anthropology and conducted postdoctoral research at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and at the London School of Economics (LSE), and later at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He published his first book, A World View of Race, in 1936, arguing that "race is a social concept which can be and is employed effectively to rouse and rationalize emotions [and] an admirable device for the cultivation of group prejudices." In 1940, Bunche served as the chief research associate to Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal's landmark study of racial dynamics in the U.S., An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.