The home of one of the largest catalogs of Black history turns 100 in
New York
[June 14, 2025]
By JAYLEN GREEN
NEW YORK (AP) — It’s one of the largest repositories of Black history in
the country — and its most devoted supporters say not enough people know
about it. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture hopes to
change that Saturday, as it celebrates its centennial with a festival
combining two of its marquee annual events.
The Black Comic Book Festival and the Schomburg Literary Festival will
run across a full day and will feature readings, panel discussions,
workshops, children’s story times, and cosplay, as well as a vendor
marketplace. Saturday’s celebration takes over 135th Street in Manhattan
between Malcom X and Adam Clayton Powell boulevards.
Founded in New York City during the height of the Harlem Renaissance,
the Schomburg Center will spend the next year exhibiting signature
objects curated from its massive catalog of Black literature, art,
recordings and films.
Artists, writers and community leaders have gone the center to be
inspired, root their work in a deep understanding of the vastness of the
African diaspora, and spread word of the global accomplishments of Black
people.
It’s also the kind of place that, in an era of backlash against
race-conscious education and diversity, equity and inclusion
initiatives, exists as a free and accessible branch of the New York
Public Library system. It’s open to the public during regular business
hours, but its acclaimed research division requires an appointment.
“The longevity the Schomburg has invested in preserving the traditions
of the Black literary arts is worth celebrating, especially in how it
sits in the canon of all the great writers that came beforehand,” said
Mahogany Brown, an author and poet-in-residence at the Lincoln Center,
who will participate in Saturday's literary festival.
For the centennial, the Schomburg’s leaders have curated more than 100
items for an exhibition that tells the center’s story through the
objects, people, and the place — the historically Black neighborhood of
Harlem — that shaped it. Those objects include a visitor register log
from 1925-1940 featuring the signatures of Black literary icons and
thought leaders, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes;
materials from the Fab 5 Freddy collection, documenting the earliest
days of hip hop; and actor and director Ossie Davis’s copy of the
“Purlie Victorious” stage play script.
An audio guide to the exhibition has been narrated by actor and literacy
advocate LeVar Burton, the former host of the long-running TV show
“Reading Rainbow.”
Whether they are new to the center or devoted supporters, visitors to
the centennial exhibition will get a broader understanding of the
Schomburg’s history, the communities it has served, and the people who
made it possible, said Joy Bivins, the Director of the Schomburg Center,
who curated the centennial collection.
“Visitors will understand how the purposeful preservation of the
cultural heritage of people of African descent has generated and fueled
creativity across time and disciplines,” Bivins said.
Novella Ford, associate director of public programs and exhibitions,
said the Schomburg Center approaches its work through a Black lens,
focusing on Black being and Black aliveness as it addresses current
events, theories, or issues.
“We’re constantly connecting the present to the past, always looking
back to move forward, and vice versa,” Ford said.
Still, many people outside the Schomburg community remain unaware of the
center’s existence — a concerning reality at a time when the Harlem
neighborhood continues to gentrify around it and when the Trump
administration is actively working to restrict the kind of
race-conscious education and initiatives embedded in the center’s
mission.
“We amplify scholars of color,” Ford said. “It’s about reawakening. It
gives us the tools and the voice to push back by affirming the beauty,
complexity, and presence of Black identity.”
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This photo provided by the New York Public Library shows an exhibit
in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York on
May 6, 2025. (Jonathan Blanc/New York Public Library via AP)
 Founder’s donation seeds center’s
legacy
The Schomburg Center has 11 million items in one of the oldest and
largest collections of materials documenting the history and culture
of people of African descent. That’s a credit to founder Arturo
Schomburg, an Afro-Latino historian born to a German father and
African mother in Santurce, Puerto Rico. He was inspired to collect
materials on Afro-Latin Americans and African American culture after
a teacher told him that Black people lacked major figures and a
noteworthy history.
Schomburg moved to New York in 1891 and, during the
height of the Harlem Renaissance in 1926, sold his collection of
approximately 4,000 books and pamphlets to the New York Public
Library. Selections from Schomburg’s personal holdings, known as the
seed library, are part of the centennial exhibition.
Ernestine Rose, who was the head librarian at the 135th Street
branch, and Catherine Latimer, the New York Public Library’s first
Black librarian, built on Schomburg’s donation by documenting Black
culture to reflect the neighborhoods around the library.
Today, the library serves as a research archive of art, artifacts,
manuscripts, rare books, photos, moving images, and recorded sound.
Over the years, it has grown in size, from a reading room on the
third floor to three buildings that include a small theater and an
auditorium for public programs, performances and movie screenings.
Tammi Lawson, who has been visiting the Schomburg Center for over 40
years, recently noticed the absence of Black women artists in the
center’s permanent collection. Now, as the curator of the arts and
artifacts division, she is focused on acquiring works by Black women
artists from around the world, adding to an already impressive
catalog at the center.
“Preserving Black art and artifacts affirms our creativity and our
cultural contributions to the world,” Lawson said. “What makes the
Schomburg Center’s arts and artifacts division so unique and rare is
that we started collecting 50 years before anyone else thought to do
it. Therefore, we have the most comprehensive collection of Black
art in a public institution.”
Youth scholars seen as key to center’s future
For years, the Schomburg aimed to uplift New York’s Black community
through its Junior Scholars Program, a tuition-free program that
awards dozens of youth from 6th through 12th grade. The scholars
gain access to the center’s repository and use it to create a
multimedia showcase reflecting the richness, achievements, and
struggles of today’s Black experience.
It’s a lesser-known aspect of the Schomburg Center’s legacy. That’s
in part because some in the Harlem community felt a divide between
the institution and the neighborhood it purports to serve, said
Damond Haynes, a former coordinator of interpretive programs at the
center, who also worked with the Junior Scholars Program. But Harlem
has changed since Haynes started working for the program about two
decades ago.
“The Schomburg was like a castle,” Haynes said. "It was like a
church, you know what I mean? Only the members go in. You admire the
building.”
For those who are exposed to the center's collections, the impact on
their sense of self is undeniable, Haynes said. Kids are learning
about themselves like Black history scholars, and it's like many
families are passing the torch in a right of passage, he said.
“A lot of the teens, the avenues that they pick during the program,
media, dance, poetry, visual art, they end up going into those
programs,” Haynes said. “A lot the teens actually find their
identity within the program.”
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