Long before Lonnie Bunch III announced stepping down as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, there were ominous signs that his departure was imminent while he insisted that the pressure from President Trump had nothing to do with his promise to retire at the end of the year, “not part of my calculus,” he said, only the least informed would willingly accept that arithmetic.
Evidence surfaced that his days were numbered last spring when Trump issued an executive order denouncing the Smithsonian for promoting a “race-centered ideology.” Kim Sajet, who Trump claimed was a “strong supporter of DEI,” was removed as director of the National Portrait Gallery, which is associated with the Smithsonian, marked another move against the institution’s leadership. Then came a 162-page report from the White House entitled “Saving America’s Story,” indicating that Bunch, without mentioning his name, could not “be trusted to tell America’s story.”
None of this should have come as a surprise to the founder of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. In fact, in his memoir “A Fool’s Errand,” he touched on the difficulties anticipated from the Trump administration that he characterized as the “current poisonous political partisanship and racial antipathy” that he hoped one day would be overcome.
Bunch, 73, may soon be out of Trump’s crosshairs, but as Othello said in the Shakespearean tragedy, he “has done the state some service and they know’t.” That service will be around as long as the Smithsonian exists. And the hope he expressed in his book for the National Museun of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), he would probably extend to the Smithsonian, in which he wrote:
Long after I have vacated the best office with the most impressive views in Washington, I hope that the museum will continue to be a source for understanding American history through the lens of African American history and culture and that while it reveal the richness and complexity of the Black experience that it never forgets to seize its own Americanness.
We have no doubt that he extends the same hope to the Smithsonian.
