Lonnie g. bunch III

Secretary
The Smithsonian Institution

Lonnie G. Bunch III, the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian, assumed his position in June 2019. He oversees 19 museums, 21 libraries, the National Zoo, numerous research centers and several education units and centers.

Previously, Bunch was the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. When he assumed that post in July 2005, he had one staff member, but no collections, funding and site for the museum. Now, a little more than four years since its opening, the 400,000-square-foot museum, devoted exclusively to exploring, documenting and showing the African-American story and its impact on American and world history, has compiled a collection of 40,000 objects housed in the first “green building” on the National Mall, next to the Washington Monument.

Earlier in his career, Bunch served as the president of the Chicago Historical Society, now called the Chicago History Museum, where he led a transformative capital campaign, managed an institutional reorganization, initiated an unprecedented outreach initiative to diverse communities and launched a much-lauded exhibition and program on teenage life titled “Teen Chicago.”

Widely published, Bunch has written on topics ranging from the Black military experience, the American presidency and all-Black towns in the American West to diversity in museum management and the impact of funding and politics on American museums. His most recent book, A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump, chronicles the making of the museum that would become one of Washington’s most popular destinations.

Bunch has worked at the Smithsonian in the past, holding several positions at its National Museum of American History from 1989 through 2000. As the museum’s associate director for curatorial affairs for six years, he oversaw the curatorial and collections management staff and led the team that developed a major permanent exhibition on the American presidency. He also developed “Smithsonian’s America” for the American Festival Japan 1994.

Bunch served as the curator of history and program manager for the California African American Museum in Los Angeles from 1983 to 1989. While there, he organized several award-winning exhibitions, including “The Black Olympians, 1904–1950” and “Black Angelenos: The Afro-American in Los Angeles, 1850–1950.” He also produced several historical documentaries for public television.

Bunch has held numerous teaching positions at universities across the country, including American and George Washington universities in Washington, D.C., and the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth. He has also served on the advisory boards of the American Association of Museums, which in 2005 named him one of the 100 most influential museum professionals of the 20th century, and the American Association for State and Local History.

President George W. Bush appointed Bunch to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House in 2002; he was reappointed by President Barack Obama in 2010. In 2019, he was awarded the Freedom Medal, one of the Four Freedom Awards from the Roosevelt Institute, for his contribution to American culture as a historian and storyteller; the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University’s Hutchins Center; and the National Equal Justice Award from the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund.

Bunch, who was born in New Jersey, received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the American University in Washington, D.C.