Museum’s 1st leader enabler of best kind

Wherever he works, Lonnie G. Bunch takes with him an 1880s photo of a former slave walking in from the cotton fields, hauling a huge basket under her arm and a hoe taller than she is over her shoulder.

“Whenever I get tired, get frustrated, get scared, I look at that and I say, ‘If she could keep taking a step forward, so could I,’ ” says Bunch, president of the Chicago Historical Society. “I just love that notion of recognizing that as hard as what I’m doing is, it’s not that hard. That keeps me motivated.”

The 52-year-old Bunch will be packing up the photo this summer and taking it with him to what could be his most challenging job yet: as the first director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

The museum has yet to be built -- there are four sites, including one on the National Mall, under consideration. Bunch will also help define the museum’s mission, develop exhibitions and public programs, acquire artifacts to illustrate the stories it tells, and coordinate its fundraising efforts and budget development.

“This really is a start-up, with great expectations,” Bunch says. “There are such expectations and hopes and needs. And all of that makes it a real challenge.”

The museum on black history, art and culture was established in December 2003. But the idea was first proposed in the 1920s, plans that were derailed first by the Depression and World War II and then Southern political opposition in the 1960s.

Bunch said that although he has loved his time in Chicago heading a new national museum was the chance of a lifetime.

“I just felt as a historian of African American culture and American culture that this was an opportunity to really create an institution that both would celebrate a culture that is so important to us but also allow all Americans to wrestle with the ambiguities, the struggles, the challenges of race,” he said.

Bunch has a fatherly, calm manner. He is a stocky man who wears glasses and has a well-cropped, graying beard and an infectious grin. He speaks in even tones and gives much thought to his answers but becomes especially passionate and energetic when talking of history and how to connect with museumgoers.

His office includes four crammed bookcases, a collection of political campaign buttons and a resolution from the city of Los Angeles, honoring the work he did there at the California Afro-American Museum in the 1980s.

Bunch was born in Newark, N.J., and grew up in Belleville, N.J. His father was a science teacher who also talked to his own children about history. Bunch caught the bug as a child, immersing himself in history books. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1974 from American University in Washington and stayed on for a master’s in 1976, and a doctorate in 1979. His degrees are in American and African American history.

He had thought he might become a history professor, but an internship at the Smithsonian turned into a job as an education specialist at its National Air and Space Museum. Bunch worked at the Smithsonian both before and after his time in Los Angeles. He held the position of associate director for curatorial affairs at the National Museum of American History -- overseeing the creation of a major permanent exhibit, “American Presidency: A Glorious Burden” -- before moving to the historical society in 2001.

In Chicago, Bunch reinvigorated what had been viewed as a stodgy institution. “Lonnie is just a very positive person who really wanted to get things done. He enabled the staff to do more than they thought they could do,” said Russell Lewis, the society’s director of collections and research. “He made people believe that his vision was good and doable.”