09/14/2026
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The administration spent a year trying to force the Smithsonian to rewrite American history. Now the man standing in their way is stepping down.
Lonnie G. Bunch III, the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, confirmed his resignation on Tuesday.
For seven years, Bunch served as the first historian and the first African American to lead the world's largest museum network. For the last year, he absorbed a relentless pressure campaign from the White House and the Department of the Interior to align the Smithsonian with what the administration called "patriotic" history.
As reported by the New York Times and the Washington Examiner, the administration threatened to strip the Smithsonian of federal funding unless it purged "divisive, race-centered ideology."
The White House publicly complained that the institution focused too much on the reality of slavery and demanded oversight of curatorial exhibitions. In a July report, the administration accused museum leadership of corrupting the American story by refusing to treat it solely as a celebration.
Bunch, 73, held the line. "History was never supposed to comfort everyone who encountered it," he told interviewers over the summer. "Its value came from presenting enough of the truth for Americans to understand both what their nation had accomplished and whom it had failed."
The pressure ultimately extracted his resignation, effective at the end of the year. But the administration cannot erase what Bunch already built.
Before he was Secretary, Bunch spent fourteen years as the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He oversaw every phase of the project, from hunting down artifacts to securing funding to fighting for its location.
Once elevated to lead the entire institution, he secured congressional approval to build two more: the National Museum of the American Latino and the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum.
He also stripped the padlocks off the archives, launching an initiative that released nearly three million digital artifacts and images into the public domain, ensuring the raw materials of American history belong directly to the public, immune to political censorship.
Because of Lonnie Bunch, a 400,000-square-foot physical museum dedicated entirely to the unvarnished history of Black Americans stands permanently on the National Mall.
The White House managed to bully a 73-year-old historian out of his job. They will spend the rest of their term looking at his life's work out their window.
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