September 2005

ALUMNI PROFILE

Meet this Year's Alumni Achievement Award Winner

Lonnie Bunch, CAS/BA ’74, CAS/MA ’76, wasn’t yet five when he gazed at the faces of unknown children and started to wonder. His grandfather 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. “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. “When you’re a little kid you can’t think of kids being dead.”

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. He'll also be honored by AU in a few weeks with the 2005 Alumni Achievement Award.

It will take $400 million and 15 years before the museum opens. Authorized by Congress 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.

The bearded, avuncular 52-year-old, greets guests to his office with a warm smile, a big hug, and “a very vigorous handshake,” said 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 Bunch to campus. He loved pouring through books, and one day made a trip to AU 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 past February) about his lifelong passion for history.

“She was really the first professor I spent a lot of time with, and her willingness to do that impressed me,” he recalled. “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.

As an AU graduate student in the late 1970s, Bunch cotaught a “very controversial” course on African American history with Kraut. “He sees the African American experience as a very important and central chapter of American history—not separate from it, but part of it,” Kraut said.

This will be the second time Bunch builds a museum from scratch. He was fresh out of AU in 1983 when he was named founding director of the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. He then returned to Washington in 1989, 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.

As associate director for curatorial affairs, he cemented his reputation as a top-notch manager. “People who work for Lonnie tend to work very well,” said Kraut. 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 an appointment to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House) he’s back at the Smithsonian again.

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.”

Now Bunch’s love of history 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 said. “I’ve had many. It’s really humbling.”

-Sally Acharya, originally published in American magazine

Come see Bunch receive this year's Alumni Achievement Award at Cocktails and Conversation in the Katzen Arts Center, Oct. 22, 2005, 7 to 10 p.m.

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