Transcripts For CSPAN2 Lonnie Bunch A Fools Errand 20240713

Transcripts For CSPAN2 Lonnie Bunch A Fools Errand 20240713

What a wonderful crowd filled with so many people. We are glad to have you here. Thank you for that introduction. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the building on behalf of all the staff connected with the National Museum of africanAmerican History and culture. Happy third anniversary. It is a great day for the museum and a great day that never would have happened without the help of all of you in this audience supporting us and encouraging us to move forward. Several months ago, 90 days ago i was at george mason university, and finished my career there. I got a phone call from the director of National Museum of africanAmerican History and culture. A good friend. He told me something that made my heart sing, that he was about to be announced as 14 secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. For me it couldnt have been more exciting except he put a link or in there. He asked me, to go the way to the mall. When lonnie bunch asks you to do same thing all you say is yes and that is what i did. It is my honor to serve in this role. I hope to serve as a stabilizing force for staff and all of you as we move forward and to make sure the momentum started by lonnie bunch and a terrific staff this year as we go forward, it has been a terrific 3 years since we opened and in those 3 years some remarkable things have happened. We have 6. 5 million visitors to the smithsonian. [applause] i often tell people we would have more except you people wont go home. You come and stay. We love that but our numbers would be higher. I dont know what to say to you about that. We have 10 million hits on our webpage, 21 books done by scholars connected with the museum and looking forward to continuing fundraising with our day 2 fundraising campaign, this to ensure the quality of the things we do continue to move forward and continue to make you proud of us. During this critical time of the museums existence is our priority to continue to develop the outstanding programs that have been part of the activities of this museum. The new secretary we expect to continue to go forward and we will continue to raise the standard you expect all along. This evening is part of the ongoing effort to have great programming to engage you with things that are important about this museum. It is my pleasure to introduce lonnie bunch as the 14 secretary of the Smithsonian Institution a fools errand creating the National Museum of African American history and culture during the age of bush, obama, and trump. [applause] thank you. A fools errand creating the National Museum of African American history and culture during the age of bush, obama, and trump book tour is generously supported by toyota. Thank you to toyota. Please follow us on twitter, facebook and instagram and joined the conversation using hashtag greeting, creating m a hc. Please welcome this evening up special guest interviewer, an american journalist and author, correspondent and anchor for cbs news for almost 30 years, the author of the 2019 book truth worth telling and correspondent for the cbs news magazine 60 minutes. Welcome, scott pelley. [applause] thank you so much and great to be with you tonight. I was thinking there is no way. Look at this crowd, it is unbelievable, thank you for being with us tonight. I thanked two members of the audience tonight. Lonnie bunchs mother is with us this evening. [applause] and Lonnie Bunchs wife is with us this evening. [applause] i want to pay particular notice to them because as we all know, behind every great man there is a surprised woman. The first time i came to this site with lonnie bunch we were wearing hard hats, before you were sitting on did not exist. It was an enormous hole in the ground. Lonnie bunch was Walking Around saying this is going to be that at this is going to be over here and this is going to be spectacular and i didnt say this but i said to myself and my head oh boy, that is a whole lot of dreaming but look at us now. Three years. [applause] three years of the museum has been open, 61 2 million visitors in its first three years. It is an unparalleled triumph thanks to the dreaming of lonnie bunch. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a very short film that will help me introduce lonnie bunch. Lets have a look at this film about the 14 secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Creating this museum gives us a chance to make manifest the dreams of many generations. We recall the lost dream back. This is a milestone moment not only for the smithsonian but the united states. The goal of the museum is to make america better, provide opportunities to be made better by the past and to move towards a future where race will always matter. They will find that those ideals are only met through sacrifice and struggle and belief in a better day. I was born by the river it is more than a building, it is a dream come true. History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlimited. By knowing this other story we better understand ourselves and each other. I too am american. I want to give a shout out to lonnie bunch. It is really important to understand this project would not and could not have happened without his drive, his energy and his optimism. 11 years we have dreamed, toiled for this day. Today a dream too long they furred is a dream no longer. We guarantee that as long as there is an america this museum will educate, engage, and ensure a fuller story of our country will be told. Welcome home. In may the smithsonian named its newest secretary, lonnie bunch iii. What i hope is i can help the smithsonian be the place people look to not just to visit but for answers to help them live their lives. For me it is about helping the smithsonian be the place that is the glue for america and helps america grapple with who it is and understand itself and its world. Ladies and author of a fools errand creating the National Museum of African American history and culture during the age of bush, obama, and trump and my dear friend, lonnie bunch iii. Thank you, thank you. [cheers and applause] sit down, weve got work to do. You are cutting into Lonnie Bunchs time. What a terrific book. I have been telling everyone it is not a book about building this magnificent monument of the 21stcentury if you ask me, it is about overcoming diverse city, it is about putting a team together, about the creativity involved and then mastering all of the obstacles that you didnt see coming. I want to ask you first about something that was one of the founding principles that you mentioned in the book. You mentioned a man by the name of princey jenkins who had lived in a shack that had once been a home to enslaved persons and Mister Jenkins told you, he said words that have shaped my career. If you are a historian, your job better be to help people remember not just what they want to remember but what they need to remember. How did that inform the work that you did here in the museum. Princey jenkins was a sharecropper, the grand sloan of an enslaved woman who lived on a plantation his whole life outside georgetown, south carolina. When i went to do research and interview him he basically wasnt sure who i was, what i did but at the end of the day he said it is really important to make sure you dont just give people what they think they want but give people what they really need. For me what that meant was how do i make sure that everybody understand that they are shaped in profound ways by the africanAmerican Experience and how do we make sure that a museum gives people things that not just commemorates and celebrates the challenges, prods, demands that they look in all the dark corners of the American Experience, princey jenkins taught me that. One of the things you told me when we did our first story about the museum for 60 minutes was in your mind this was never going to be a few will simply a museum of slavery. I think it was really important to realize slavery is central to understanding the American Experience, the africanAmerican Experience but thats not the totality of Life Experience and for me i was trying to find the right tension between resilience, optimism, pain, and understanding. I wanted this museum to be a place that would allow you to cry when you ponder the pain of slavery or segregation but i also wanted you to tap your toes to Aretha Franklin or somebody from the hiphop world, i have no idea who it was, but the goal was simple, to say i wanted this museum to tell a fool, complex picture, picture that doesnt have simple answers but a lot of shades of gray, like life. If you were living in chicago when this job came around and you were not sure you wanted to take this job, theres a line in the book i just love. The charge of conceptualizing and building a National Museum, one potentially on the National Mall was frightening enough but even more unsettling was the reality that this was a museum of now. What did you mean by that . This is a museum that started with nothing. It had one member of the staff besides myself, it had no collections, it had no idea we would be where we are today, there was no money raised and candidly there were very few people who really believed this would happen. My notion was am i willing to take that leap and believe we could no matter how long it took, we could turn the know into a place that mattered. Lets talk for a moment about the incredible beauty of the building itself, the architecture of the building itself. You were given a lot of different plans to go over in order to select and a lot were unsolicited. People had decided that they knew what the museum should look like. This is my favorite from the book, the most original unsolicited idea was sent to our offices in 2008. As i sat at my desk my executive assistant Deborah Shriver miller in her role as linchpin of the museum in later chapters struggled to bring in a large package of architectural drawings. There were more than 100 pages the detailed what this person felt was the perfect structure. As we reviewed the material i realized that this architect had developed a design of the building in the shape of a black power fist. [laughter] that design did not make the shortlist, but tell us how we did end up with this magnificent building. The reality is when i saw the drawing of the black power fist i realized many things i could get through congress, i dont think i could that. What happened was we realized once we got the spot on the mall, that was a big deal, once we had it, my Deputy Director and i spent a lot of time thinking what should this museum be . So many people came to us, should the museum look african . Not sure what that meant. Should the museum look like slavery. I wanted a museum that spoke of spirituality, resiliency and uplift, i wanted a museum that would be the first green museum on the mall. It was important to say this would be a lead goal building. Also what i wanted was a building that had dark color because i wanted people to realize that america has often undervalued or under less than understanding the africanAmerican Experience. There has always been a dark focus in america and i thought it would be important to be not too subtle and to make sure this was on the mall and that is what i tried to do. Every building on the mall is twice. The best part of this is regulatory agencies had to approve this and at one point we took this design to regulatory agencies and they find we accept this but can you do one thing, could you make the building white . So i said if you will stand in front of the New York Times and Washington Post and say the African American museum has to be in a white building, then i will do it. And he did one of those never mind. Tell us about the design, the bronze colored panels that are called the corona. What is the root of that design and how did the corona come about . To me that makes this building the eiffel tower, the great wall of china, the kind of thing that if you are looking at this building i know where i am. It is a combination, like any origin story, there are different stories, the idea came from one of two places. Either it came from conversations where we saw pictures of black women whose hands and prayer were at this angle, the architect argues that it comes from a your room the piece that he saw so i am not sure where it came from, but i am sure how we got the corona. What happened was once we decided we would do this bronze corona, you had to puncture it in some ways it was too reflected in the architect said we will make holes. I paid too much money for holes. I went to new orleans and charleston to take pictures of that ironwork that enslaved craftspeople did and that is on the entire building so the building is an homage to the fact that the homage to america was built by people we will never know. Every time i see the building i see the African American experience but i see all those laborers that have been left out of history. [applause] in fact, the way we met was because of those laborers who were left out of history. Migrate 60 minutes producer, nicole young and i, the 150th anniversary at the building of the capitol dome. As we got into the research we discovered of course that the dome was built by enslaved people to a large degree so we started to try to find a historian who knew about that history and that is how we found lonnie bunch. We did the interview, put the story on the air and i am working on this other project which resulted in two more sensational stories for 60 minutes. The building is beautiful but it is worthless without a collection and the collection in my view is the more difficult part. Let me read another moment from lonnies book, when i became director of the museum i had many issues that caused me to worry, but nothing, not raising money, hiring staff, managing the bureaucracy of the institutional dealing with the Museums Council caused me greater concern than the challenge of building a national collection. If there was one axiom that shaped the Museum Careers of curators of color it was the belief in the possibly of objects that illustrate africanAmerican History and culture. Very few museums had significant artifacts and objects explored race, therefore making the crafting of traditional exhibitions very difficult and usually unlikely. Now you have 30,000 artifacts. Or 40,000. I stand corrected, it is growing every day. 40,000 artifacts in this museum, how on earth did that happen . We had long conversations early on. We decided for the smithsonian people come to see the ruby slipper, greensboro lunch counter, the right flyer, we felt we had to find those collections but i remembered something early in my career i was collecting california and i was told this woman had a treasure trove of material and i went to her house and she said she had nothing and to get rid of me she said go look in the garage. I went into the garage and there was an amazing amount of material and i never forgot and i thought maybe and then one night i was doing something in front of the television and suddenly antiques roadshow was on, what a great idea. We then created our version of antique roadshow called saving epic and american treasures, sounded more scholarly than the antique roadshow and then we began to go around the country to help people preserve grandmas old shawl, 19 century photograph and to bring out materials and we thought first of all lets give things to local museums but it came back to dc and i am amazed what we were able to find. The story where we received a call after we had done these programs so people knew we were looking. I received a call from a collector in philadelphia and he said he had material of Harriet Tubman. I remember thinking i am a 19th century historian, no one has anything of Harriet Tubman but come to philadelphia because at the very least i will buy you a philadelphia cheesesteak. I thought thats not a bad deal so a bunch of us go, we went and this guy was a huge former penn state football player, 6 foot 3, 300 pounds and he brought out this little box and opened the box and pulled out pictures of Harriet Tubmans funeral that no one had ever seen and we were stunned. I said oh my goodness and he got excited and punched me. It hurt. He pulled out 33 things and punched me every time. Right in the solar. And then he pulled out this hymnal that had all those spirituals Harriet Tubman would sing when she goes to the south, swing low sweet chariot and suddenly we are all crying. I am crying from the pain but other folks are crying from this and we couldnt afford this stuff, it is priceless so we danced around it for a while and i finally said what is this going to cost . What will it take to get this material and he said you can take it now. The generosity of people, what allowed us to build a collections that once we knew we could find things like Harriet Tubman, then i knew we could find other things, overwhelming 40,000 arguments, in peoples homes. We really changed the way you think about collecting and because of peoples belief in the smithsonian that they can trust the smithsonian, we have what you have in this building. Tell us about this thing who has so much residences, matt turners bible, what a remarkable thing to have existed. I was giving a speech, an archaeologist comes to me and says i can help you find material from nat turner and show you where the insurrection occurred. I dont have time for that. This guy calls every month for 6 months. He takes me to southhampton county, where this inspiration occ

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