Lonnie Bunch

Lonnie G. Bunch III (born November 18, 1952) is an American educator and historian.Bunch is the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, the first African American and first historian to serve as head of the Smithsonian. He has spent most of his career as a history museum curator and administrator.

Bunch served as the founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) from 2005 to 2019. He previously served as president and director of the Chicago History Museum (Chicago Historical Society) from 2000 to 2005. In the 1980s, he was the first curator at the California African American Museum, and then a curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, wherein the 1990s, he rose to head curatorial affairs. In 2020 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Bunch was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1952 to Lonnie Bunch II (a science and chemistry public school teacher) and Montrose Bunch (a third-grade teacher public school teacher), both graduates of Shaw University, one of the oldest HBCUs in the South. He grew up in Belleville, New Jersey, where his family were the only African Americans in their neighborhood. His grandfather, a former sharecropper, moved into the area as one of the first black dentists in the region. As a child, he experienced racism from white teenagers in his neighborhood. Bunch credits his childhood experiences with local Italian immigrants and his reading of biographies as a youth with inspiring him to study history. Bunch wanted to give a voice to those who were "anonymous" or not written about. In 2011 Bunch reflected on the early exposures: "I was in junior high, and we were reading biographies of historic figures. I remember one on Gen. ‘Mad Anthony’ Wayne, and one on Clara Barton, and Dorothea Dix. I thought, ‘Were there no histories of black people?’ One day, I was going through my grandfather's trunk and I found a book about black soldiers in the First World War. I devoured it."

He graduated from Belleville High School in 1970. Bunch attended Howard University but transferred to American University, Washington, DC, where he earned his B.A. and M.A. in American history and African history.

Bunch started working at the Smithsonian Institution while he was working on his master's degree. After graduating, he was hired as a history professor at the University of Maryland. In 1983, he became the first curator at the California African American Museum. He worked at the National Museum of American History from 1989 until 1994 as a curator. He was promoted to Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs at the museum before leaving in 2000 to become the president of one of the nation's oldest museums in history, the Chicago Historical Society (Chicago History Museum), from 2001 to 2005. In Chicago he led a successful capital campaign, and promoted outreach to diverse communities. One noted exhibit, Teen Chicago, focused on teenager life.

In 2005, Bunch was named the director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture. As founding director he designed a program of traveling exhibitions and public events prior to the opening of the museum.

He also served on the Commission for the Preservation of the White House during the George W. Bush administration and was reappointed to the Commission by President Obama in 2010.

On May 28, 2019, Bunch was elected Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He became the first historian and first African American to lead the Smithsonian in its 173 year history, taking on his new role in mid-June 2019 On February 12, 2021, Bunch was appointed to the Congressionally-mandated Commission on the Naming of Items of the Department of Defense that Commemorate the Confederate States of America or Any Person Who Served Voluntarily with the Confederate States of America.

Exhibits and research

He curated the National Museum of American History exhibition The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden. The exhibition was curated, built, and opened within eight months.

Bunch met Maria Marable in graduate school; they would eventually marry and she became Maria Marable-Bunch. The couple have two daughters.

• 2011 : Jackie Robinson Society Community Recognition Award
• 2017 : American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2018 : Phi Beta Kappa Award for Distinguished Service to Humanity
• 2019 : Honorary degree of Brown University (LHD)
• 2020 : Dan David Prize

• with Laurence P. and Martha Kendall Crouchette Winnaker, Visions Toward Tomorrow, the History of the East Bay Afro-American Community 1852-1977. Oakland: Northern California Center for Afro-American History and Life. 1989. ISBN 0-9622334-0-4
• with Spencer R. Crew, Mark G. Hirsch and Harry R. Rubenstein, 2000. The American Presidency, A Glorious Burden. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 978-1560988359
• with Donna M. Wells, David E. Haberstitch and Deborah Willis, 2009. The Scurlock Studio and Black Washington: Picturing the Promise. Washington: National Museum of African American History and Culture. ISBN 978-1588342720
• Call the Lost Dream Back: Essays on History, Race & Museums. Georgia: Big River Books. 2010. ISBN 978-1933253176
• with Spencer R. Crew and Clement A. Price, 2014. Slave Culture: A Documentary Collection of the Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Project. Connecticut: Greenwood. ISBN 978-1440800863
• Bunch, Lonnie G. (2019). A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the age of Bush, Obama, and Trump. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press. ISBN 9781588346681. OCLC 1089275852.