African American History Museum Gets $5 Million Gift

Lonnie G. Bunch III, the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, is traveling around the country listening to ideas from scholars and the public about what should be in the next Smithsonian museum.

Smithsonian officials say they expect the museum to cost in the neighborhood of $500 million, more than the recently opened Newseum and the most expensive Smithsonian project to date.

Yesterday, Bunch's effort at gathering ideas received a significant boost from Boeing. No, not a jet, but a gift of $5 million, the projected museum's largest gift to date, part of which will underwrite the meetings. "Boeing will fund efforts to bring together representatives from existing African American history museums and community leaders throughout the country to share ideas about what this new museum will represent and what it will contain," said Todd Hullin, Boeing's senior vice president for public policy.

The donation was announced at a lunch in the Smithsonian Castle, not far from the site on the National Mall at 14th Street and Constitution Avenue NW where the museum will be built. It is scheduled to open in 2015.

No one talked about the cost directly, but Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), the chairman of the House subcommittee that funds the Smithsonian, pledged his support. The congressional legislation that authorized the museum set up a 50/50 public-private partnership. "I am strongly committed to making sure we meet our side of the agreement," said Dicks, adding he hoped the Boeing action would inspire others to donate to the project because "this museum will serve to enrich the lives of all Americans in telling the history of one of the most dynamic communities in our country's history."

The work of the museum has started with a traveling photography exhibition, workshops on saving historical items, an archive of 1,800 oral histories and work on a design concept, headed by architects J. Max Bond Jr. and Philip Freelon.

Artifacts from the collecting effort were displayed at the lunch. On the table was a white Pullman porter's hat; a 1950s sign from the Nashville City Transit System that read "This Part of Bus for Colored Race"; and a beige patterned skirt, made in the 1860s by a slave in Leesburg, Va.

The skirt is part of the 4,000-item collection from the Black Fashion Museum that has been donated to the new museum. Joyce Bailey, the daughter of fashion museum founder Lois K. Alexander Lane, who died last year, said her mother "always wanted to make a contribution in the name of her people. I didn't want my mother's legacy to pass away. With the realization that the National Museum of African American History and Culture had actually become a reality, I decided that would be the place."

Also on the table was the Congressional Gold Medal, given to the Tuskegee Airmen, the first black military aviators, who flew in segregated units in World War II. Bunch reminded the group at the luncheon that the planes flown by the pilots were made by a division of Boeing.