Director of Smithsonian's new African-American museum discusses the power of history

On Sept. 24, President Obama will go to the National Mall to dedicate the National Museum of African American History and Culture, launched by Congress in 2003 and standing in the shadow of the Washington Monument. Founding director Lonnie Bunch, 63, has been working on the project for more than a decade. During Black History Month, he sat down with Capital Download to discuss what he hopes the Smithsonian's newest museum means to America, and what it's meant to himself. Questions and answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q: When people walk in to the museum, what will they see?

A: They’ll get to see some amazing artifacts that I’m stunned that we have ... like, oh, Nat Turner’s Bible, or a hymnal that Harriet Tubman carried with her. Or you’ll see pieces from a slave ship that we brought up from off the coast of South Africa. ... But you’ll also see things that will make you smile. You’ll see Chuck Berry’s guitar. Or you’ll see the Mothership from George Clinton or you’ll see beautiful quilts that will make you realize the creativity that was at the heart of this community.

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Q: Is there an object that is particularly meaningful to you?

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A: I am still overwhelmed by the piece of wood that we brought up from a slave ship off the coast of South Africa. ... The tribal chieftain from that community told me that when you go back to where that ship is, if you could take soil from Mozambique, where most of the people came from, and if you could sprinkle that soil over the ship, then for the first time since 1794, our people will sleep in their own land.

Q: Did you do that?

A: I did. We sprinkled the soil over the ship and we really felt the power of both ancestors and the power of helping people understand a big story, a horrific story, by looking at a piece of wood that was touched and stepped on by the enslaved.

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Q: The debate about race in this country isn’t just history. Will the Black Lives Matter movement be included in the museum?

A: It’s crucial for us to help people realize that history is not nostalgia. History is this amazing tool that helps people live their lives to understand the challenges they face. When we look at things like Black Lives Matter, it’s crucially important for us to interview people involved, to go to Baltimore and interview people around the crisis there. To begin to collect artifacts — shirts that say ‘Black Lives Matter’ or the posters that people carried.

One is part of the job of any museum is to anticipate what historians will want to know 50 years from now. ... The other part of it is to recognize that if you want to be a place of value, a place of meaning, you’ve got to let people to use the past to understand better the present.

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Q: Where does Black Lives Matter fit in the arc of African American history?

A: You could argue that almost every generation within this period of history has said, how do we help America live up to its stated ideals? Some say it was the abolitionist movement to end slavery. Others could look to the early women’s organizations in the early 20th century that demanded equality for black men and for women. But I think Black Lives Matter — it’s not, as they say, your grandmother’s civil rights movement.  But what it is is a moment that says, how do we take advantage of technology, how do we take advantage of people’s interest, how do we take advantage of the media to effect change? So in some ways Black Lives Matter is part of a long tradition of saying, we can perfect America if we're willing to challenge America.

Q: You grew up in New Jersey in the 1950s and 1960s. Were you touched by the civil rights struggle going on then in the South?

A: Because my mother’s family was from the South, we would go to the South several times a year, and I can remember that sense of dread. I didn’t know who Emmett Till was — the young person who was killed when I was 2 years old, as a teenager from Chicago going to the South. [Emmett Till's original casket will be exhibited in the museum.] But we always knew that as a cautionary tale. We knew that something had happened to Northern teenagers going South. ...

And I can remember like it was yesterday driving with my parents, driving to North Carolina, and my mother didn’t drive in those days; my father was driving. And I remember he got tired, and he pulled off into what we would now call a motel. And I remember that he got out to smoke a cigarette. And suddenly I looked up, my brother was asleep, my mother was asleep, and he was standing under a sign that said ‘Whites Only.’  And I remember being terrified.

I remember when he gets back into the car, he sees that I’m kind of agitated, and he said, ‘You know, this is my America, too, so I have a right to be everywhere.’

Q: You have two millennial daughters. Do they look at race differently than you do?

A: I would say that millennials look at race on the one hand very differently, as something that’s much more fluid, that isn’t as rigid a boundary as it was when I was growing up. But on the other hand, what I’ve found is they also recognize that race still matters. And so what they do is, they don’t find themselves reacting to race as the first cause, as I might have done, but they still recognize that race is such an important factor that shapes opportunities and expectations. ...

They believe that you can overcome that, that the challenge is to shine a light on it, to confront it, whereas many people in my generation really didn’t believe you’d ever be able to overcome it.