Lonnie Bunch
Lonnie G. Bunch III (born November 18, 1952) is an American educator and historian. Bunch is the fourteenth 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.
Lonnie Bunch
November 18, 1952
Newark, New Jersey, U.S.
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.[1] 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.[2]
Early life and education[edit]
Bunch was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1952[3] to Lonnie Bunch II, a science and chemistry public school teacher, and Montrose Bunch, a third-grade public school teacher,[4] both graduates of Shaw University, one of the oldest HBCUs in the South.[5] 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.[6] As a child, he experienced racism from white teenagers in his neighborhood.[6] Bunch credits his childhood experiences with local Italian immigrants and his reading of biographies as a youth with inspiring him to study history. He wanted to give a voice to those who were "anonymous" or not written about. Reflecting in 2011 on the early exposures, Bunch said: "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."[5]
He graduated from Belleville High School in Belleville, New Jersey in 1970.[3] Bunch attended Howard University[3] and later transferred to American University in, Washington, D.C., where he earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in American history and African history.[7][3]