LONNIE BUNCH III TO RECEIVE PRESIDENT’S AWARD AT NAACP IMAGE AWARDS SATURDAY

Prestigious Honor Recognizes 30 Years of Dedication as one of the Nation’s Leading Figures in the Historical and Museum Community

Ceremony Broadcast Live on TV One Saturday

LOS ANGELES, CA – The NAACP announced today that historian, author, curator and educator, Lonnie G. Bunch, III will be presented with the NAACP “President’s Award” at the 48th NAACP Image Awards telecast LIVE from 9-11 p.m. ET on February 11 on TV One.

The NAACP “President’s Award,” chosen by NAACP President and CEO Cornell William Brooks, is bestowed in recognition of special achievement and distinguished public service. Past honorees include John Legend, Van Jones, President Bill Clinton, Soledad O’Brien, Ruby Dee, Muhammad Ali, the Founding Members of the Black Stuntmen’s Association, Kerry Washington, and Spike Lee.

“Historian, scholar and author Lonnie G. Bunch III, has secured among the sacred places of the American story, a place of honor for the contributions of African Americans to our nation’s history. As the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), he has helped to amplify stories of our struggles and striving to wrest the shackles of oppression from both body and mind in our undeniable quest to be free,” said Cornell William Brooks, President and CEO, NAACP.

“Dr. Bunch’s relentless work to shine a magnificent light into the incredible American prism of the Black experience from enslaved plantations to the White House mansion, has earned him this year’s NAACP President’s Award. The award bears the name of the NAACP but is invisibly inscribed with the names of Americans of every hue and heritage representing the gratitude of the nation for Dr. Bunch’s efforts.”

Lonnie G. Bunch, III is the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. In this position he is working to set the museum’s mission, coordinate its fundraising and membership campaigns, develop its collections, and establish cultural partnerships. He is designing a high-profile program of traveling exhibitions and public events ranging from panel discussions and seminars to oral history and collecting workshops.

Prior to his July 2005 appointment as director of NMAAHC, Bunch served as the president of the Chicago Historical Society, one of the nation’s oldest museums of history (January 2001-June 2005). There, he initiated an unprecedented outreach initiative to diverse communities and launched a much-applauded exhibition and program on teenage life titled “Teen Chicago.” He also led a successful capital campaign to transform the institution in celebration of its 150th anniversary and managed an institutional reorganization.

Bunch has held several positions at the Smithsonian. As the National Museum of American History’s (NMAH) Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs (1994-2000), he oversaw the curatorial and collections management staff of nearly 200. In addition to leading the curatorial team that developed the major permanent exhibition “American Presidency: A Glorious Burden,” he served as co-author of the exhibition’s companion book by the same name.

While assistant director for curatorial affairs at NMAH (1992-1994), Bunch developed “Smithsonian’s America,” an exhibition that explored the history, culture and diversity of the United States; it was shown in Tokyo, Japan as part of the “American Festival Japan ’94. He also supervised the planning and implementation of the museum’s research and collection agendas. As a supervising curator at NMAH (1989-1992), he oversaw several of the museum’s divisions, including Community Life and Political History.

From 1978 to 1979, Bunch was an education specialist and historian at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, where he developed multi-cultural instructional programs and researched and wrote the history of African Americans in aviation.

Bunch served as the curator of history for the California Afro-American Museum in Los Angeles from 1983 to 1989. There he organized several award-winning exhibitions including “The Black Olympians, 1904-1950” and “Black Angelenos: The Afro-American in Los Angeles, 1850-1950.” Committed to making history accessible, he also produced several historical documentaries for public television.

A prolific and widely published author, Bunch has written on topics ranging from slavery, the black military experience, the American presidency and all black towns in the American west to diversity in museum management and the impact of funding and politics on American museums. In 2010, he published the award-winning book “Call the Lost Dream Back: Essays on Race, History and Museums.” “Slave Culture: A Documentary Collection of the Slave Narratives” was published in 2014 and in 2015 he published “Memories of the Enslaved: Voices from the Slave Narratives.” In 2016, Bunch co-authored “From No Return: the 221-Year Journey of the Slave Ship Sao Jose.” Lectures and presentations to museum professionals and scholars have taken him to major cities in the United States and to many nations abroad including Australia, China, England, Italy, Japan, Scotland, South Africa, Sweden, Ghana, Senegal and Cuba. Since 2008, Bunch has served as the series co-editor of the “New Public Scholarship Edition” of the University of Michigan Press. During the inaugurations of President Barack Obama, Bunch served as an on-camera commentator for ABC News.

In service to the historical and cultural community, Bunch has served on the advisory boards of the American Association of Museums, the African American Association of Museums, the American Association of State and Local History, and the ICOM-US. Among his many awards, he was appointed by President George W. Bush to the Commission for the Preservation of the White House in 2002 and reappointed by President Barack Obama in 2009. In 2005, Bunch was named one of the 100 most influential museum professionals in the 20th century by the American Association of Museums and in 2009, Ebony Magazine named him one of its 150 most influential African Americans. Again, in 2016 he was chosen as one of the 100 most significant African Americans by Ebony Magazine. In 2011, BET (Black Entertainment Television) selected Bunch to receive its BET Honors for outstanding service to American education. In 2014, BET selected Bunch as one of its ICON Men for his work mentoring young African American men. In recent years, Bunch has been honored with: Visionary History Award, DC Historical Society (2016), Rainbow Push Torchbearer Award (2016), Delta Sigma Theta Remembering Our Heritage Award (2016), and National Newspaper Publishers Association Torch Award (2016). In 2016, Bunch was listed as #1 in the Washington Business Journal’s Power 100 ratings and in Vanity Fair’s Hall of Fame.

For additional information and the latest news, please visit the official NAACP Image Awards website at http://www.naacpimageawards.net.

SHOWTIME AT THE APOLLO & THE NAACP IMAGE AWARDS SHOWS

My second SHOWTIME AT THE APOLLO special airs on February 1st.  We’ve got so much great music and comedy you’ve got to check it out!

THE NAACP IMAGE AWARDS AIR FEBRUARY 11TH ON TV ONE!

I’m producing again so it’s going to be tight! Set your DVR now!

Can the comic-book assassin Deathstroke take on gun violence in Chicago?

By David Betancourt January 25

“Deathstroke No. 11″ sees the DC Comics assassin head to Chicago. (Courtesy of DC Entertainment)

Before he could accept an offer to become the writer for a new Deathstroke series, veteran comic book writer Christopher Priest first had to look within himself and decide whether he could take on being the voice behind one of DC’s most violent characters.

“Deathstroke has sort of been this kind of glorification, if not deification of violence,” Priest told The Washington Post’s Comic Riffs. “[He] is kind of an anti-hero. We were kind of rooting for the bad guy as he slashed and conducted all this bloodletting, which kind of goes against my values as both a human organism walking the earth and particularly as a Christian and as a minister.”

Priest eventually decided to become the writer for Deathstroke’s new series that debuted last August as a part of DC Comics’ “Rebirth” era, but told himself the only way he could do it would be to turn the series around so that the book didn’t feel like a glorification of violence, but rather a character study on the effect living the lifestyle of an assassin has on that person.

For “Deathstroke No. 11,” now available both in print and digitally, Priest takes a break from that mission and for one issue focuses on a real-world topic that frequently weighs heavy with him: Chicago’s gun violence.

Before sending Deathstroke to Chicago, Priest reached out to director/producer/writer Reginald Hudlin (director of “House Party” and “Boomerang”). Hudlin made comic book news two years ago when Comic Riffs revealed that he would lead the efforts to resurrect Milestone Comics (now Milestone Media), a diverse group of comic book superheroes of color. Priest said he felt a Deathstroke-in-Chicago story dealing with gun violence had a Milestone vibe, and wanted to know whether Hudlin was interested in collaborating with him on it.

Many ideas where exchanged, but Hudlin couldn’t find time to help co-write the issue because he was too busy directing “Marshall,” a yet-to-be-released biographical film on the first African American Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall. That didn’t stop Priest from finding another Milestone collaborator — artist Denys Cowan, a founder of Milestone who illustrated many of their comics and who last worked with Priest during their run on the series Steel (which ended in 1998) for DC Comics. Cowan accepted the one-issue assignment and dove into drawing a script that was more of a look into part of Chicago’s soul than Deathstroke’s.

Priest uses a reporter to investigate rumors that the families of shooting victims have hired Deathstroke to take out the armed killers of their children. Deathstroke is mostly silent through the issue, while Chicago citizens debate whether an eye for an eye can ever be the right way to answer back to violence.

The silence from the assassin was intentional, according to Priest. “I wanted Deathstroke to be a force of nature more,” Priest said. “I wanted to have as objective an analysis of the crisis as I’d be able to do. So I used a reporter’s voice.”

Cowan told Comic Riffs that he knew when working on Deathstroke No. 11 that he was getting away from the standard superhero comics he has become accustomed to illustrating over the years.

“Most of the stories that we do in comics, especially stories that I’ve done, are not about violence. They’re about action. You got people flying through the air and doing impossible things that real people can’t do. That’s action. It’s fantasy,” Cowan said. But in this issue, “things become very real. It takes you beyond the typical comic book story. So to try to capture all of that was the challenge with this. And hopefully we pulled it off.”

(Courtesy of DC Entertainment)

(Courtesy of DC Entertainment)

(Courtesy of DC Entertainment)

(Courtesy of DC Entertainment)

STEVE HARVEY IS BRINING BACK ‘SHOWTIME AT THE APOLLO’ FOR A TWO-HOUR SPECIAL

BY COMEDY HYPE TV OCTOBER 13, 2016

Before there was the current pool of talent shows on TV, there was one; Showtime At The Apollo. The hit series filmed at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, NYC is now returning to television for a special hosted by Steve Harvey. The series is also being spear-headed by director Reginald Hudlin of Boomerang, and House Party. If you can recall Steve Harvey was once a former host of the series.

Showtime At The Apollo is returning to television with a two-hour Fox special on December 5. The re-imagining of the long-running syndicated variety show will be hosted by Steve Harvey, the most in-demand emcee for the last few years. The comedian, who will be joined in the special by comedy and music stars, has a personal connection to the Apollo theater where he launched his career. He also will host a second, one-hour Showtime At The Apollo special to air on Fox in early 2017. Reginald Hudlin, writer-producer, former president of an entertainment for BET and producer of the 2016 Academy Awards, will executive produce and serve as showrunner. The show’s original executive producer and director, Don Weiner, will executive produce and direct the special.