ISO Slave Ship

Lonnie G. Bunch III is looking for a slave cabin and a slave ship. They're not exactly things you can get on Craigslist, but Bunch is certain he can at least secure remnants from which to tell the story he's out to tell, according to a story in the Washington Post.

He's already got a Jim Crow railroad car, a drinking fountain labeled "colored," an 1874 house built by freed slaves, an 1895 letter from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington and the coffin of a 14-year-old whose 1955 death in Mississippi helped spark the civil rights movement. On a lighter note, so to speak, he also has Louis Armstrong's trumpet.

This is a man on a national treasure hunt. As the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, he's after people's stuff — their great-grandfather's letters, their grandmother's clothing, the accumulated paraphernalia of generations stored in attics and basements.

His goal is to bring African-American history to life for the American public, and the best way to do that is to put visitors right in the middle of that history. For the part about black education, for example, he doesn't just want pictures of schoolkids and antiquated erasers. Instead, he ponders how to secure "a one-room schoolhouse or the interior of a classroom."

Bunch, the former president of the Chicago Historical Society and associate director for curatorial affairs at the National Museum of American History, has been as much sleuth and community liaison as historian in the process of digging up these artifacts.

"I went to two or three churches every Sunday and told people what we were doing," he said, according to the Post. "I have had a lot of weak tea with wonderful elderly black ladies."

Illustration courtesy of Quadell, via Wikimedia Commons