| BY SALLY ACHARYA
Lonnie Bunch ’74, ’76 wasn’t yet five when he gazed at the faces of unknown children and started to wonder. His grand-
father was reading to him from a storybook full of black-and-white photos when the older man spoke words that would stay with Bunch a half century later.
These children are probably dead by now,” he said, and then told his grandson something just as startling. “No one knows the names of those children. Isn’t it a shame that they lived their lives and died and just ended up in a book as anonymous?”
Bunch still recalls his amazement. “It drew me up short. When you’re a little kid you can’t think of kids being dead,” he says.
The young boy from New Jersey began to peer intently at pictures of long-gone people as if they held secrets that could be uncovered. If only he looked a little harder, perhaps, he could make the past emerge before his eyes.
“Were they happy?” he’d wonder as he looked. “Were they sad? Did they have a good life? Were they discriminated against?”
The pursuit of those questions would lead him to become a highly regarded historian and museum director who has now taken on a challenge that will find him making history in the world of museums. Bunch was tapped in March to serve as the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
It will take around $400 million and 15 years before the museum opens its doors. Authorized by Congress only two years ago, the museum is still at such an embryonic stage that a site hasn’t yet been chosen. The decisions made by Bunch, and the direction in which he leads it, will determine the shape of what is sure to become one of America’s leading cultural institutions.
It’s a huge responsibility. The person taking it on is a bearded, avuncular 52-year-old who greets guests to his office with a warm smile, a big hug, and “a very vigorous handshake,” says history professor Alan Kraut. “He always makes a big impression. He’s friendly; he’s bubbly; he really lights up a room.”
It was the library that first drew him to campus. He loved pouring through books, and one day made a trip to the AU library from Howard University, where he was a sophomore. Bunch ended up in a discussion with history professor Dorothy Gondos Beers (who died at age 95 this February) about his lifelong passion for history.
Even in elementary school, he had been a voracious history reader. Elias Howe. Mad Anthony Wayne. Any biography on the library shelf was likely to end up in his hands. Another passion was collecting the trading cards issued during the Civil War centennial of individual soldiers with biographical details on the back. “I was fascinated by that,” he recalls. “‘Wow! I can find out about these people!’”
But he wasn’t sure if history could be a practical major. Talking with Beers, he made a decision. “She was really the first professor I spent a lot of time with, and her willingness to do that impressed me,” he recalls. “It seemed she spent hours giving me books to read, talking about what I was interested in, really making me feel I could major in history and be a historian. The excitement she shared with me cemented the direction I was going. “
Bunch transferred to AU and worked under Beers, doing a senior thesis on the relationship between black and white soldiers during the Civil War. At the time, African American history was a small field barely noticed by historians. Yet Bunch had learned more about it as a child than many scholars. Bunch’s father was a lover of conversation who talked with his children about current events, literature, and philosophy, and often seemed to throw in the comment, “I read this John Hope Franklin’s book.” The seemingly obscure reference was to a seminal 1940s book by a groundbreaking black historian, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. In the course of family conversations, the blanks in history were filled in for the Bunch children. By the time Bunch was nine, he already knew that not all blacks in antebellum America had been slaves—a fact known to few people beyond historians even today.
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