In search of slave clothes: A museum director’s hunt for a painful symbol

The fantasy find for historian Lonnie G. Bunch III includes a tattered pair of pantaloons made of that old “Negro cloth” and a coarse linen shirt that all but disintegrated on the back of its enslaved owner. Maybe a thrashed pair of brogans, too, worn around the plantation until the soles fell off.

“Slave clothing,” Bunch said, almost wistfully, of the most elusive item on his historical wish list. “Still can’t find any.”

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Bunch, the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, is tantalized by the possibility that somewhere — in an attic or basement — somebody has work clothing once worn by a black slave.

He desperately wants to find, authenticate and restore it, then use the potent symbol of a painful past to humanize the story of slavery. But he and his staff of historical hunter-gatherers haven’t come close.

“Not at all,” Bunch said. “People will call me and say they have something — and it’s just a pair of Lee jeans made in 1925.”

He sighed.

As the Smithsonian Institution prepares to break ground next month, a critical curatorial deadline looms for the first national museum devoted to black American history: 90 percent of its collection should be acquired by the end of this year, Bunch said, to leave enough time to create, revise and finalize the inaugural exhibitions.

“By early in 2013, we’ve really got to shut it down,” he said of the historical treasure hunt. Acquisitions will continue after that, Bunch said, but the majority of the late-arriving artifacts won’t be displayed when the museum opens on Constitution Avenue, in the shadow of the Washington Monument, in late 2015.

So seven years after his appointment, Bunch is borderline obsessed with finding the unfindable for the centerpiece “Slavery and Freedom” exhibition planned for the 350,000 square-foot museum’s lower level.

“That’s the spine of the museum, the most dramatic moment,” he said in an interview at his headquarters, on the seventh floor of a nondescript building at L’Enfant Plaza, about a mile from the museum’s future home.

Building the museum’s collection from scratch, a staff of 13 curators has acquired some significant slavery artifacts, including wrought-iron shackles and a slave cabin from Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

“We even have a whip and some other instruments of slave torture,” Bunch said. “We’re going to alienate some people, but it’s about giving the general public an understanding of what the institution of slavery meant and still means. It’s not just the African American story; it’s the story of America.”

Collecting has long been part of Washington’s DNA. The region is rich with museums (there are dozens in the District, according to the American Association of Museums), each of them a repository for thousands of artifacts and dreams of unearthing more.

Of course, no institution here has amassed a larger collection than the Smithsonian, whose network of 19 museums collectively owns more than 137 million items. Its shelves boast everything from Albert Einstein’s pipe to 100,000-year-old fossilized sloth dung. Not for nothing is the Smithsonian often called “America’s Attic.”