Arthur Schomburg’s Legacy by Darryl Pinckney recounts the story of the founding of the famed library in New York devoted to Black history and culture. Here are a few paragraphs from the article in the New York Review of Books on how one person worked so hard to establish this center:
Arturo (Arthur) Schomburg was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1874. His mother was a black laundress from the Virgin Islands and his father a mestizo merchant of German descent long resident on the island. He came to New York in 1891 and joined the Cuban and Puerto Rican revolutionary movement, but factional disputes at the close of the Spanish-American War led him to turn his attention to the cause of black American freedom instead.
Schomburg was not just a “race man,” as activists used to be called, he was also an organization man. He belonged to a number of groups of pioneering black intellectuals. In 1911 he cofounded the Negro Society for Historical Research. In 1920 he was elected president of the American Negro Academy, of which W.E.B. Du Bois had been one of the original members when it was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1897. Alfred A. Moss Jr. in The American Negro Academy: Voice of the Talented Tenth (1981) observes that although Schomburg had written articles and had a reputation as a book collector, he did not have a college degree, and his election over more distinguished members was a sign to some of the Academy’s decline. Washington as the center of black intellectual life had been superseded by New York, and according to Moss, Schomburg was unable to attend to the Academy’s business in person. He was its last president when it folded in 1928.
The Harlem branch of the New York Public Library opened in 1905 on the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. By 1920, when the area was becoming overwhelmingly black, Ernestine Rose, the head librarian, and Catherine Latimer, the first black librarian there, believed that the branch needed a special reference collection to preserve the historical record of black people. Schomburg, a longtime patron of the library, was chairman of the committee that developed the plan for the Department of Negro Literature and History, which was established in 1925. The following year the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation to purchase his collection of 3,338 bound volumes. He was not paid what it was worth, Elinor Des Verney Sinnette tells us in Arthur Alfonso Schomburg: Black Bibliophile and Collector (1989), but he didn’t care too much. He knew what he had done. He served as curator of the collection from 1932 until his death in 1938, and the library was renamed the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in 1972.
Because of the eventual fame of the collection, many people assumed that Schomburg was a philanthropist, but he’d amassed his library on a modest income. He searched in the warehouses and secondhand bookstores of New York at a time when what he was looking for was not of much value to most people. As a Caribbean-born Spanish speaker, he urged black Americans to look into black history before slavery and black culture in other countries, not just in the United States. He also took an interest in black artists, and in the early twentieth century he began making a collection of prints and etchings.
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