Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III Looks Back at the Opening of the African American History Museum on Its Tenth Anniversary

Bunch, the museum’s founding director, recalls some of the behind-the-scenes moments that led to the doors opening for the first time a decade ago

“All their voices, roaming for centuries, have finally found their home here.”

The U.S. representative John Lewis spoke these words just ten years ago—four years before his death—at the dedication of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The ceremony was one of the most unforgettable days of my life. George W. Bush, an early supporter of the museum, declared that “a great nation does not hide its history.” Legendary singers Stevie Wonder and Patti LaBelle performed. And Barack Obama, then serving as the first African American president of the United States, reminded us that “our glory derives not just from our most obvious triumphs but how we’ve wrested triumph from tragedy.”

That day represented more than a decade of work, more than a century of dreams and half a millennium of history. “People say this is the tenth anniversary,” Kinshasha Holman Conwill, the museum’s first deputy director, told me, “but it’s really the 20th.”

Long before the star-studded celebrations and fanfare that opened the museum, NMAAHC consisted of a tiny staff with grand ambitions. One day in 2006, Evelyn Lieberman, the Smithsonian’s communications director, camera in hand, suggested that Holman Conwill and I, then the museum’s director, look from the balcony of the American History museum, across the street to the empty tract of land where the new building would stand. I still recall the sense of excitement we felt looking at the site.

The next ten years were full of similar unseen, unsung, unknown moments, fundamental to the creation of the museum. Colleagues worked around the clock; donors and advisers made themselves available at any time, for any reason; volunteers showed up repeatedly, before there was even a building, cementing our faith that this would be a place for all Americans.

At the end of the inaugural event, instead of cutting a ribbon, we invited four generations of the Bonner family to ring a historic church bell. As 99-year-old Ruth Bonner, whose father was born into slavery, pulled on the Freedom Bell along with her 7-year-old great-granddaughter Christine, dozens of churches around Washington, D.C. and across the country joined them, ringing their bells in unison. 

When I asked Lynn Chase, the museum’s former project director, what her favorite memory of the opening was, she recalled walking to her car the night before the ceremony, looking out on the gleaming museum and the orbit of news cameras setting up for the next day. “I felt like I was standing on the most important corner in the city,” she said. “I was moved to tears for what we had accomplished.”

Ten years on, I feel the same.