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SPOTLIGHT
LONNIE BUNCH
FOUNDING DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
The Smithsonian’s hottest new installation fulfills a lofty mission centuries inthemakinganditsdirector’schildhooddream. ByKareemaCharles
FPO
l As a boy growing up in northern New Jersey in the 1960s, Lonnie Bunch III was browsing through his grandfather’s basement when he came across a history
of African Americans at war. The tome would become an inspiration for this nation’s premier institution chronicling the history of his people.
Bunch discovered the volume, The Negro in World War I, after he and his grandfather reviewed a history book that labeled some schoolchildren “unidentified” in the caption accompanying a photograph.
What a pity, his grandfather mused, Bunch has said in several interviews, “that people can live their lives, die, and simply be forgotten.”
Something clicked.
His grandfather’s wistful words and the book of black warriors that Bunch found tucked away, he said, had plant- ed a seed that blossomed into a quest to learn more—he devoured biographies of black luminaries like Booker T. Washington, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth.
But his quest evolved over decades into a mission to found and direct the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian Institution’s 19th— and hottest—museum.
“This moment was born out of a century of fitful and
frustrated efforts to commemorate African American history in the nation’s capital,” Bunch said in an article he wrote for the Smithsonian Magazine as the museum opened. “It was in 1915 that a group of African American veterans of the Civil War proposed a museum and memorial in Washington.”
The NMAAHC is making a mark. It drew 2.4 million attendees in 2017, the fourth most visited Smithsonian installation. Its success is the culmination of a career that began decades before in his grandfather’s basement.
After high school, Bunch attended Howard University but where he completed his bachelor’s master’s and doc- toral degrees at American University.
While earning his PhD., he worked as an education spe- cialist at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. His passion for African American history encouraged him to research and write about the history of African Ameri- cans in aviation.
He had a passion for uncovering stories of the anonymous or voiceless. He wanted to understand them and their lives while using history to comprehend racism he experienced growing up in an Italian enclave of Newark, New Jersey.
“There were people who treated me wonderfully and peo- ple that treated me like hell,” he told Smithsonian’s magazine last year, marking a year at the helm of NMAAHC, “and I wanted
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PHOTO: IMAGE COURTESY OF THE SMITHSONIAN