Arturo Schomburg

I think I first heard of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture when historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad was its director. Part of the New York Public Library, it was founded in 1925 and now has a collection of more than 11 million items.

It got its name from the donation, a year after its founding, of the collection of a Harlem-based scholar and bibliophile, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. It was renamed in his honor in 1940, after his death.

What I didn't know about Schomburg until much more recently, though, was that he was Afro-Puerto Rican. He came to New York in 1891 at age 17, at time when there were only 1,500 Puerto Ricans in the city. He used the Anglicized version of his first name for much of his career.

This 10-minute (audio) episode of Latino USA gives some of the details.

It's Black History Month, and today particularly is Transit Equity Day (in honor of Rosa Parks' birthday). As we mourn yet another Black man killed by Minneapolis police in egregious circumstances, it's important to call out the many parts of Black history and culture that are often below the radar of mainstream (white) notice, whether that's Black literary arts or the very existence Black Latinos.

The Schomburg Center sounds like a great place, with performing art spaces, galleries, as well as the research infrastructure you would expect. They also have an online listing of their collections, framed with a Schomburg syllabus and research guides on a range of topics. (A quick look shows me they have the papers of Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, and Ella Baker, for instance.) Their current featured exhibit is about Black comics, and their blog has a number of recent posts on that topic.

_______

Photograph from the New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1900–1935.