The Schomburg Center: One Man's Library Against Erasure

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg was born in Puerto Rico in eighteen seventy-four to a Black Afro-Caribbean mother and a German merchant father. As a student in San Juan, a teacher told him that Black people had no history, no heroes, no civilization worth studying. The statement was intended to close a door. It opened one instead.

Schomburg began collecting. First books. Then manuscripts. Then letters, artwork, photographs, newspapers, legal documents, objects, anything that constituted evidence of African and African American intellectual and cultural life across the centuries. He was not a trained archivist. He was an insurance agent and a Freemason and a passionate amateur scholar who spent decades accumulating proof. By nineteen eleven, his collection had outgrown his home in Brooklyn. By nineteen twenty-six, it had outgrown his life's capacity to house it, and he sold the collection to the Carnegie Corporation for ten thousand dollars.

That collection, installed at the One Hundred Thirty-Fifth Street branch of the New York Public Library in Harlem, became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Schomburg himself was appointed its curator in nineteen thirty-two, a position he held until his death in nineteen thirty-eight. He spent his last years surrounded by the evidence he had spent his life gathering.

The Schomburg Center today holds eleven million items: photographs, manuscripts, rare books, film, audio recordings, art, and artifacts. It is the world's largest repository of African Diaspora materials. Seventeen thousand items are digitized and publicly accessible. The building at One Hundred Thirty-Fifth Street and Malcolm X Boulevard sits at the heart of the neighborhood whose cultural flowering it now archives. Every writer, musician, and artist of the Harlem Renaissance lived within walking distance of the building that now holds the evidence that they existed and mattered.

The teacher who told Schomburg that Black people had no history did not foresee this room.