*Lonnie Bunch is a historian, educator and author, and all of his vocations have shaped for what he does nowadays. He is the founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Bunch believed that the communities in America are, and have always been, divided. Issues of race and White Supremacy have always been the forefront of his conversations. He believes that his museum can be a place that helps visitors explore how and why this division exists.
Other than this, his museum provides visitors a look through the African American lens in order to find optimism and a reason to believe that you can always effect change – no matter how bad things are. This is exactly what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wanted and this is exactly what this museum wants to bring forward in Washington.
Bunch said in an interview that he thinks the King would be impressed by how the middle class of his community has grown and how more and more of the youth are graduating from college. He also thinks that if King was alive, he would be pleased to see that there are better notions of integration present today.
One of the standpoints of the museum is how segregation used to occur all over America and how the Black community was deprived of the American dream. This is why this museum can show people that we have come a long way and we can still move forward.
The motto behind the ideation of this museum was to capture how Dr. King’s dream is living on. Even though a lot of streets are named after Dr. King, Bunch believes a lot more needs to be done to signify the progress the Black community has made.
In an interview, he stated that King would be disappointed with how the communities are still facing a hidden kind of segregation in the work place and schools. He would have also been perplexed at how this problem still exists 50 years later. Addresses the factors that divided communities, he really wants the museum to challenge them by bringing the communities together. He strives to do this until Dr. King’s legacy is no longer a dream but is the beautiful reality of America.
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