Giving Voice to the Anonymous

By: Stephanie WilliamsAt 48, Lonnie G. Bunch is making history.

As the new president of the Chicago Historical Society, he is the first African American to head one of the city’s major non-ethnic museums.

But Bunch does not emphasize the historic significance of his role. Instead, he dwells on the significance of history. For Bunch, history is a way of life.

“I’m an historian first and foremost,” he said. “History to me was both so real and so precious that I wanted to spend my time understanding it, sharing it with people and making it accessible to people.”

Bunch recalled an evening in the late-1950s when he sat on his grandfather’s lap, reading a book in the basement of the family home in Belleville, N. J., where he grew up. His grandfather pointed to a photograph of children. Bunch, about 5 at the time, remembered the photo caption identified the children as “anonymous.” His grandfather, Lonnie Griffith Bunch Sr., said, “Isn’t it a shame that people could live their lives, die and just be known as anonymous?”

“Now [at the time], I had no idea I’d be an historian, but something about that moment stuck with me,” Bunch explained. “In a way it really is the roots of my becoming an historian. … I see myself as somebody whose job it is to make the invisible visible, to give voice to the anonymous.”

Bunch left his small hometown and became a highly regarded historian and museum administrator—key reasons, museum professionals said, he was selected to head the 145-year-old historical society, at 1601 N. Clark St. in Lincoln Park.
Bunch’s appointment is especially notable because “the historical society was founded by the original movers and shakers of this city,” said Sharon Gist Gilliam, vice chair of the society’s board of trustees. Gilliam served on the search committee that unanimously chose Bunch.

“Because it is so old, and whether it is true or not today, certain people perceive it to be an institution with very old and Waspy roots,” said Gilliam, who is also executive vice president of Unison Consulting Group and chairperson of the Chicago Housing Authority Board of Commissioners.

“Lonnie is one of the most highly respected and nationally known individuals in the profession,” said Edward Able, president and chief executive officer of the American Association of Museums, a Washington, D.C.-based institution that accredits and provides research for museums nationwide. “He is a great historian and a great motivator of people. … Chicago is extremely lucky.”

And Bunch “has both the academic credentials and the curatorial expertise,” said M. Hill Hammock, chairman of the society’s board and chief operating officer at LaSalle Banks. “Lonnie is extraordinarily well balanced, a great fit,” he said. “Lonnie has a real passion for history … and that’s what really made the difference.”

Dark-skinned with a slight beard and round face, Bunch has a fatherly, unassuming bearing that makes him very approachable.
He moves comfortably among his many roles: historian, museum executive, educator, author and family man. Next to being a family man, Bunch is most proud of his role as an historian. And while Bunch downplays his race, he is breaking ground in Chicago and the nation. Only a handful of black executives oversee the country’s “mainstream” cultural institutions, industry experts say. And the nation’s major museums have few people of color in the ranks of curators and board trustees.

Pussyfooting Around
In 2001, Chicago should not be “celebrating” such a “first,” said Carlos Tortolero, executive director of The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, the Midwest’s largest Mexican art museum, at 1852 W. 19th St. in Pilsen. “We should be on the fifth, sixth, seventh or eighth,” said the Mexican-American native of Chicago. “To have a first now tells us how far we haven’t come.”

Tortolero wrote about the lack of diversity in cultural institutions in the November/December 2000 issue of Museum News, a publication of the American Association of Museums. The museum community needs to stop “pussyfooting around” and integrate, he wrote.

Many in the nation’s cultural community mistakenly believe they have already achieved diversity. “There are some [industry] people who feel the issue has had its run,” Tortolero said, but if you look at curatorial staffs, directors and presidents, museum leadership is “still lily white.”

Last summer, Bunch wrote in Museum News that in the 1970s “the museum field was awash in whiteness,” and even now “the profession I love has to make the commitment to change.” He called on museums to recruit, hire, select and foster the professional growth of a more diverse group of executives, staff and volunteers. Bunch suggested more internships and fellowships, and recommended that museums ally with community-based programs.

“There are few minorities staffing the museums across the country. The same is true with our boards” of directors, said Able, a 15-year veteran of the field. “The fault lies within our profession. We’re not spending a lot of time recruiting” minorities at the college and even high school level. “We have to expand and nurture minority recruitment. … We still have a long way to go.”

“Search committees don’t search as hard as they could,” Hammock said. And he agreed that if cultural institutions were willing to look harder “they could find more minorities.”

Lerone Bennett Jr., author of 10 books on African American history and executive editor of Ebony magazine, called Bunch’s appointment a “breakthrough.” It shows the “other major white cultural institutions across the country—which also have a tremendously bad record on this level—that it can be done, diversity can be achieved at this level,” said Bennett, a lifetime trustee of the Chicago Historical Society.

Amina J. Dickerson, director of corporate contributions at Kraft Foods Inc. and from 1985 to 1989 president of Chicago’s Du Sable Museum of African American History, agreed with Bennett. “There’s been a strong push to diversify at the historical society. This is the fruit of that labor,” said Dickerson.

Now the challenge will be, “how do you keep it from being cyclical and move it into a sustained presence?” noted Dickerson. “I hope he won’t be the last one.”

New Frontier
While Bunch understands the role of race in his appointment, “the more important issue is that I do the job that I was brought on to do,” he said.

“He’s a trailblazer, certainly. He wears that hat comfortably,” said Spencer Crew, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, Behring Center, in Washington, D.C.

Bunch started at the National Museum in 1989 as a curator, and worked as associate director of curatorial affairs from 1996 to 2000. By the time he left the National Museum, he was supervising a staff of about 240 and a budget of about $8 million.

But it was at the California Afro-American Museum in Los Angeles where, Bunch said, he “learned how to do it all—administratively, socially and scholarly.” From 1983 to 1989, Bunch, its founding curator, and Aurelia Brooks, the director, transformed the museum from “an idea into a major institute,” moving it out of the space it shared with another museum and into its own building while growing its budget to more than $1 million.

“Many a night Lonnie and I slept in the museum. We were figuratively and literally living there,” Brooks recalled.

The job seasoned Bunch in staff management and budget development, he said. During his six years there, he won several awards, including a 1989 Exemplary Cultural Achievement Award from the city of Los Angeles.

Bunch’s last project at the National Museum was a permanent exhibit he collaborated on with colleagues Crew and Political History Curator Harry Rubenstein: “The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden.” The collection, which opened last fall, examines the lives of American presidents.

In June of 2000, Bunch was invited to apply for the Chicago Historical Society post vacated by Douglas Greenberg, the society’s president since 1993. Greenberg resigned to become president and chief executive officer of the Survivors of the
Shoah Visual History Foundation in Los Angeles.

“I wasn’t looking to leave anytime soon. … I was very content at the Smithsonian,” Bunch said with a smile. He had received calls from recruiters before, but never acted on them. This was different, he said. “This was—and is—one of the most important historical museums in the country.”

But it was his wife of 21 years who helped push him to the decision, he said. Maria Marable is, Bunch said, his “soul mate, colleague and best friend.” She convinced him Chicago was his “natural” next step.

It was a logical step for the couple whose courtship began at a museum. They met at the Smithsonian in 1978 while she was working as an intern and studying for a master’s degree in museum education at George Washington University. Bunch was an historian at the Air and Space Museum.

A colleague kept pushing Bunch to “check out” the new intern, Bunch recalled, but he paid no attention. Then, about a week later, Bunch saw Maria working at a desk. He remembered thinking, “Wow.”

“I promptly introduced myself.” Within a year, they were married. And the rest, he said, was history.

Marable, 48, resigned from her job as the director of the Department of Teacher and School Programs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The family has bought a home in Oak Park, and this fall their daughter Sarah, 13, will enter eighth grade at Emerson Junior High School. Their oldest, Katie, 17, will begin her freshman year at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Next Generation
Bunch “has the ability to galvanize people from all walks of life,” added Crew, who is African American. Bunch now oversees the society’s $120 million in assets, including its endowment and building; a budget of just under $10 million; and 150 full-time staff members. The society also just successfully completed a three-year, $30 million capital fundraising campaign. The money will be spent on improving the museum’s permanent and visiting collections, such as “The American Presidency.” This Smithsonian exhibit will come to the society in February of 2002.

Still, Bunch will not rest on anyone else’s financial laurels, he said. “Fundraising is a perpetual project. It’s like breathing—you have to do it all the time.”

Since he joined the museum in January, Bunch has been meeting Chicago’s philanthropic community, helping his family relocate and getting to know the city and his staff.

The entire staff, from maintenance workers to management, gathers monthly for lunch in Bunch’s office, he said. “One of the things history teaches you is that you never do anything alone.”

Bunch’s challenge as the museum’s chief executive will be to broaden the society’s identity as a historical research center, said Hammock, the board chairman. “Lonnie has a national presence that … will boost the museum’s national identity,” and the society wants to build on that, he said. Bunch also wants to create community programs. “The neighborhoods in Chicago offer great variation, and we must tap into this,” Bunch said.

“It says a lot about the city of Chicago on some level … as they’ve embraced and entrusted me to lead the historical society,” noted Bunch. “It shows a level of commitment to diversifying.”

And diversity, museum officials agree, is what is needed if museums expect to thrive in a competitive Chicago market.

As a black historian, Bunch understands the struggles and sacrifices of previous generations. “I really never think about what I’ve accomplished,” he said. “What I’m doing is basically paying off debts to a lot of people who didn’t get the shots that I got. … It’s a way of saying thanks, in honoring their sacrifices.”