CCHS Public annual Lecture with Lonnie Bunch

As the Founder and Director of the African American Museum, Lonnie Bunch gave our annual lecture on Building the Dream : the creation of the African American museum and the problem of race in American Museums . Based at the Institute of Advanced Studies UCL for the last four months, he has been an inspirational presence raising our conscience of what can and should be the role of a national museum in constituting a history of race and modern subject hood.  As Founder/Director of the African American Museum, he emphasised, that the intention was not to build a museum only to celebrate the history of African Americans nor exclusively a history of Americans slavery but to show how both were constitutive of American identity in the broadest cosmopolitan sense.   As you can see attached, he shows how a museum can expose in an original way the paradox of how a nation founded on the principle of liberty can be embedded in an economy based on slavery and he reveals how the crafting of a new museum can be achieved from a beginning that started with no collections and a sense of a need to remember rather than a wanting to remember by all. We were most fortunate to have a response given by David Lammy MP who also asked when might we expect to achieve something similar in Britain, admitting that we have still far to go in achieving this. 

• Broadcast
• National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC)
• David Lammy, Labour Member of Parliament for Tottenham

Photo: © 2018 Lonnie Bunch, courtesy of Cecile Bremont