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.”
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.”
Jaylen Green, The Associated Press
