His historical imagination was also sparked by family gatherings in New Jersey and North Carolina. The young Bunch would hear stories about his father’s great-grandmother, known in the family as “Grandma Jane,” who had been a slave. He’d hear stories about sharecropping and about the family’s migration north. “In a way, it was also my family that gave me a sense of being connected to the past,” he says. “The past wasn’t just dates you needed to learn. It became a way to understand who I was.”
Sadly, the family has no letters or photo collections in a forgotten attic trunk. It’s the same problem that faces historians in documenting the experiences of the past as most people lived it: People who aren’t on statues also don’t tend to have descendants who carefully preserve their letters and donate them to archives and museums. The nascent museum is, so far, a museum without a collection.
“The challenges are monumental,” Bunch says. “I think the good news is there are things in families’ homes. We need to create almost a national collecting initiative and really get people to look into their attics, into their collections. I do believe there are things just sitting in trunks.”
Another challenge is that “so much of this history is oral history. There has to be a way to figure out how to draw from the best scholarship and use these stories and these histories.”
Bunch has never been ruffled by pressure or challenges. Always an independent thinker, he demonstrated an early ability to stand his ground in controversy. As an AU graduate student in the late 1970s, he co-taught a “very controversial” course on African American history with Kraut. “I wanted to do it,” Kraut recalls, “but a white professor teaching African American history in that political environment was difficult. We did it together and had a very good time doing it, but I remember at one point some students came to Lonnie and said, ‘You’re African American, and so are we. We want you to grade our papers.’”
Gently but firmly, Bunch told the students: “That’s not how we do it here.”
Bunch always approached African American history as part of the complex fabric of the experience of all Americans, and not as a separate or isolated subject. “I think that’s what makes Lonnie such a very, very strong person in the world of museums and history,” Kraut says. “He sees the African American experience as a very important and central chapter of American history—not separate from it, but part of it. Lonnie does not believe in self-imposed ghettoization. He’s very much inclusive.”
As for the challenge of building a museum from scratch, this will be the second time for Bunch. He was fresh out of AU in 1983 when he was named founding director of the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, where he learned everything from California history to how to write labels. He then returned to Washington in 1989. That would prove to be his second time at the Smithsonian; as an AU graduate student working at the Air and Space Museum in the 1970s, he not only gained experience but
fell in love with an intern, another graduate student who became his wife.
The next time around, as associate director for curatorial affairs, he cemented his reputation as a top-notch manager. “He’s a very likable, very fair person,” Kraut says. “People who work for Lonnie tend to work very well.” So well, in fact, that in 2000 the Smithsonian team he led in producing a permanent exhibit called American Presidency: A Glorious Burden managed to bring the sprawling show from idea to opening in a record eight months.
After four years as director of the Chicago Historical Society (and such accolades as an appointment to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House) he’s back at the Smithsonian again. “I’m like a bad penny,” he quips. “This is going to be my third time at the Smithsonian.”
It will be a challenge of historic proportions. Bunch envisions the new museum as a place for all Americans. “It has to be seen by all Americans as a wonderful way to understand who we are and what we’ve become as a people. It’s a story that is ripe with heroes and struggle and tragedy. It appeals to the African American community, but this is also a wonderful lens for all Americans to understand issues of resiliency, optimism, social change—things that mean something to all of us.”
Whenever he faces a high moment in his career, the image of his grandfather, reading to him from that book of history, comes back to him. In Japan several years ago as head of the huge Smithsonian’s America show in Tokyo, Bunch was in a conference room overlooking a scene of cherry blossoms when it began to snow. A man was speaking in Japanese, and the translator was listening and waiting to tell Bunch what was being said.
“I suddenly found myself thinking of my grandfather, the one who read to me,” Bunch says. “I saw him just shaking his head and smiling that his grandson was running a team interpreting American culture for the nation of Japan. I just found that hilarious, and at the same time, so touching.”
Now the love of history first nurtured by his grandfather will have an impact on the way America tells its own story. “I’ve always thought that in a career, if you have one great moment that can nurture your soul, you’re lucky,” Bunch says. “I’ve had many. It’s really humbling.”
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