Founding Director Lonnie Bunch's vision: New Smithsonian museum takes shape

Lonnie Bunch is only the ninth person in American history to accept his current assignment: create a new national museum.

He is the founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture. As such he has to assemble a collection, raise funds, hire staff, plan exhibits, spread the word and, not the least, build a museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and open it in 2015.

Bunch is up to the task. And he is not doing it alone. He has a staff of about 75 now, and that will grow to about 200 by the museum’s opening, he said. He’s traveling the country all he can — he’s in D.C. maybe 10 days a month, the rest of the time he’s in and out of airports, crossing the country and back, looking for artifacts (the fun job), giving talks (he was at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst the evening before he visited Great Barrington in mid-May).

I can share a little of what he’s been up to, having sat at his left during a noontime meal during that visit. I was there thanks to my participation in the Upper  Housatonic Valley African-American Heritage Trail, which covers northern Litchfield and southern and central Berkshire counties, and as a steering committee member for the Friends of the W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite in Great Barrington. UMass Amherst owns the Du Bois Boyhood Homesite and has nurtured a relationship with  Bunch in the hopes of future collaboration.

Bunch came to Great Barrington to learn more about Du Bois and he went away having also heard stories of Elizabeth Freeman, Milo Freeland, the Rev. Samuel Harrison, James Weldon Johnson and a lot more.

I drove Bunch and Odell Murry, who holds the literary rights to the Du Bois Papers held by UMass, around Great Barrington in my humble Chevrolet Malibu, to show them where Du Bois was born (at the foot of Church Street), where he worked as a timekeeper at age 16 (when Kellogg Terrace was under construction) and where he spoke in 1890 of his experiences as a student in Germany (Clinton African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church on Elm Court).

When our group lunched at the Aegean Breeze, we quizzed Bunch on his mission.

First, he has to collect artifacts related to the African-American experience, he said. He has a big budget, but prefers to solicit donations. And things are rolling in. Within another two years, he has to have a collection of quality, exhibit-ready items. He is not tapping the resources of the other Smithsonian museums; he is starting brand new.

And the things he’s found!

The Smithsonian has a reputation for having the real things, real airplanes, real dresses worn by the first ladies.

“Visitors,� he said, “expect to feel the power of the authentic.�

He plans to deal with the issues of slavery and racism head-on, yet in a creative and, for whites, reasonably comfortable manner.

“Do you anticipate any Enola Gay experiences?� I asked him, remembering the controversy the Museum of Air and Space found itself over wording in an exhibit of the airplane that dropped an atomic bomb over Hiroshima.

“I’ve already had two,� Bunch replied. “Henry Louis Gates phoned me to offer the handcuffs.� These are the handcuffs a Cambridge police officer slapped on Gates’ wrists last year during a widely publicized confrontation.

“I told him I didn’t want the handcuffs,� said Bunch, who prefers to accent the positive, rather than the negative.

“I told Skip Gates I’d rather have the bottles and table where he and President Obama and the Cambridge officer had beers,� said Bunch.

But it turned out Gates appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s daytime television program and told her he was giving the handcuffs to the Smithsonian. And as Winfrey is on Bunch’s board of directors, to keep things simple, he took the handcuffs.

A second incident arose from something he was never even offered, Bunch said. O.J. Simpson’s sport coat, the one he wore at his double-murder trial. Word got out that the Smithsonian had turned it down.

“We didn’t want it,� Bunch said. “It wasn’t appropriate. We never say we don’t want something, but the press office made the statement before I heard about it. So it became a big thing.� (The jacket eventually went to the Newseum.)

Particularly challenging is the accumulation of popular culture items. Bunch was offered Michael Jackson’s hat for $1 million. He told the potential donor to call him if he didn’t find another taker. Bunch ended up with the hat. For $10,000.

Already in the collection are a skimpy costume worn by Josephine Baker (“It doesn’t take up much storage space,� he joked) and a dress once worn by another Jackson: Mahalia (“Now that’s meaningful to me,� Bunch commented).

Pop culture is very hard to gauge. “I want my curators to build a collection that, in 50 years, future curators will be able to use to make sense of what was going on in the 2010s,� he said. Already, Fonzie’s jacket and Archie Bunker’s living room set are puzzlers to the youngest visitors to other Smithsonian museums.

Bunch is fully confident in himself and his staff. He wants to create a great museum, one that will convey the American experience, not just of blacks, but of all of us.

Those of us meeting with Bunch that day hope that a connection can be made to give more exposure to this region’s contributions to African-American history.

Bernard A. Drew of Great Barrington, an associate editor with The Lakeville Journal, was a founding trustee of the Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area.