Lonnie G. Bunch III

Lonnie G. Bunch III is an American historian and museum curator, the 14th secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (2019– ), and the first Black person to hold that office. He was also the driving force behind the creation of the institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. As the founding director of what would become one of the Smithsonian’s most-visited museums, he oversaw fundraising, construction, and curation of the museum’s 105,000 square feet of exhibits. In September 2026 Bunch announced his plans to retire as Smithsonian secretary by the end of the year.

Early life

“I knew from a very early age that history mattered,” Bunch told Encyclopædia Britannica in 2022. “My grandfather read to me.…I was only four years old, but I would look at the pictures, and I knew I wanted to know the stories of the people.”

Bunch was born in Newark, New Jersey, the elder son of high school science teacher Lonnie G. Bunch, Jr., and third-grade teacher Montrose Boone-Bunch. He grew up in a largely Italian American neighborhood, and race was a constant presence during his childhood. “We were the only Black family in the neighborhood,” Bunch recalled in the interview with Britannica. “I remember playing in the street, and one of the mothers came out with Kool-Aid for the kids. She told me that I could ‘drink out of the hose.’ So I learned how to straddle many worlds, and that’s how history became my weapon in a fight for fairness and social justice.”

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After attending Howard University in Washington, D.C., he received bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees from American University.

Early career

Bunch started his career at the Smithsonian, and although he would leave it several times for opportunities at museums elsewhere in the United States, he found the Smithsonian to be always more siren than institution. He has described it as the place that “gave me not just a career but a calling.” It is also where he met the woman who became his wife, Maria Marable-Bunch.

Bunch’s first job at the Smithsonian was as an education specialist at the National Air and Space Museum, on the National Mall, in 1978–79. He left that position to join the team that opened the California African American Museum in Los Angeles in time for the 1984 Olympics, which the city hosted. As part of that museum project, he curated an exhibition on the history of Black Olympic athletes that featured, among others, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, famous for giving the Black Power salute during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Developing that exhibition, Bunch later said, taught him that “protest is the highest form of patriotism. It’s not about hating a nation but expecting a nation to live up to its promises.”

Bunch returned to Washington and the Smithsonian in 1989, this time to work at the National Museum of American History, where he became associate director for curatorial affairs. In 2001 he left the Smithsonian again to become president of the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum). It was during his tenure there that he met Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, who had been murdered in Mississippi in 1955 when he was 14 years old. That meeting with Till-Mobley, who became an icon of the civil rights movement for her devotion to telling her son’s story, would shape much of the next chapter of Bunch’s career.

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“I spent several hours with her,” Bunch later said. “She told me everything that happened from the time she kissed him goodbye until the time she buried him. She carried that burden for 50 years, and in that meeting she asked me to carry on his legacy.” Bunch oversaw an exhibition on lynching at the Chicago Historical Society before the Smithsonian beckoned him back to Washington once again.

Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture

Bunch became the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in 2005. The only problem was that there was no museum. Over the next 11 years he secured almost $600 million in public and private funds, hired Tanzanian-born architect David Adjaye to design a 400,000-square-foot (37,000-square-meter) building across the street from the Washington Monument, and secured more than 35,000 artifacts to put on display.

By Bunch’s own admission his fingerprints are on every aspect of the museum, including the way visitors experience the exhibits. “I had never done a museum where you have a forced march,” Bunch said, referring to the path all museumgoers follow, starting with underground exhibits that tell the story of Black people in Europe’s American colonies and the United States from the earliest days of slavery. When visitors emerge from those exhibits, they are welcomed into the museum’s Contemplative Court, where a cylindrical fountain gently rains into a pool. There are benches to sit on for quiet consideration of the exhibits just experienced. Quotations line the walls. Each was chosen by Bunch, including Sam Cooke’s iconic lyric “A change is gonna come.” When he recalled choosing that one, Bunch laughed deeply. “How could I not include Sam Cooke?”

Among the tens of thousands of artifacts collected for the museum, two hold special meaning for Bunch. First is the casket of Emmett Till, which Till’s family discovered had been discarded when his remains were exhumed and reburied in 2005. When Bunch learned that the family might donate it to the not-yet-opened museum, he recalled his meeting with Till’s mother: “I kept hearing Mamie Till-Mobley saying it was my turn to make sure Emmett was never forgotten.”

The other artifact Bunch cherishes most came to the museum by way of a phone call from Philadelphia historian Charles L. Blockson. “He called me and said if I came up to Philadelphia, he’d make it worth my while, so I went,” Bunch recounted to Britannica. When the two men met, Blockson showed Bunch pictures from Harriet Tubman’s funeral and a small hymnal that Tubman, though she couldn’t read, had carried with her throughout her life. “To this day, I can’t get over the fact that I’ve held in my hands Harriet Tubman’s hymnal,” Bunch said.

The museum’s eventual opening, in 2016, was a star-studded affair attended by Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder, and scores of other celebrities. It was presided over by U.S. Pres. Barack Obama. The museum immediately became one of Washington’s most visited attractions, to the delight of Bunch, who, after becoming Smithsonian secretary, told The Washington Post, “I want to help the museums become as community-centered and as exciting to the public as the African American Museum is.”

Running the Smithsonian

The success of the NMAAHC led in 2019 to Bunch’s elevation to the secretaryship of the Smithsonian Institution, where he oversees 19 museums and nine research centers as well as the National Zoo. The first African American and the first historian to hold that post, he came to the job with big plans to modernize an institution founded in 1846 and to accelerate the development of its digital presence. Nine months after his appointment, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. “I used to be known as the guy who created the African American History Museum. Now I’m known as the guy who closed the Smithsonian—twice,” Bunch said with a chuckle. With all the museums having reopened by 2022, he saw his mission as finding “the right tension between tradition and innovation. Museums need to have a more contemporary resonance.” That must be done without losing what Bunch considers the essence of what he calls society’s most-trusted institutions: “The role of a museum is to define reality and to give hope.”

Tangling with Trump

Bunch’s job running the institution affectionately referred to as “the nation’s attic” grew politically complex with the second administration of Pres. Donald Trump. In the wake of an executive order in January 2025, the Smithsonian disbanded its office of diversity. In a note informing the staff, Bunch wrote, “Our core values of fairness and equity for all remain unchanged.…We have long told the stories and embraced the experiences of all Americans and we will keep doing so in line with our mission.”

In March 2025, in another executive order, the president called for “restoring truth and sanity to American history.” The tensions escalated when, in May, Trump fired Kim Sajet, the director of the institution’s National Portrait Gallery, whom Trump called “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI” in a social media post announcing the move. Weeks later the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents issued a statement saying that personnel decisions are at the sole discretion of Bunch as secretary. Sajet later resigned.

Throughout the rest of 2025 Trump periodically scolded the Smithsonian over exhibits and even the placard next to his portrait in the presidential portraits exhibit at the Portrait Gallery. Through it all Bunch—amid speculation that he would quit or be fired—tried to navigate maintaining the integrity of the institution without needlessly incurring presidential wrath. On July 4, 2026, the White House released a 162-page report on the National Museum of American History, saying that it had become “a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”

Bunch responded in a letter to Smithsonian staff, reiterating the institution’s mission. “We remain focused on what grounds us: a steadfast commitment to scholarship, nonpartisanship, independence, accuracy and integrity.”

Despite the at-times fractious relationship with the Trump administration, Bunch said his 2026 decision to retire was not politically motivated. “For, I don’t know, 45 years, work has taken precedence over family, and I just said at 73, enough’s enough,” Bunch told The Washington Post, adding that he wanted to spend time with his children and grandchildren. In that interview he also expressed confidence that the Smithsonian would remain an independent institution intent on recounting the country’s story:

America is not afraid of its own history. My job is always to help the Smithsonian tell complicated stories that really allow us to understand the fullness of the American experience.