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For those of us who have an interest in or study Black history, Arturo Schomburg is a familiar name. The name also graces a library of renown in New York City, known as The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
“The Schomburg Center is one of the largest and oldest archives that is publicly available to anyone of Black history throughout the diaspora,” Leah Drayton, senior PR manager at the center, said.
The Schomburg Center is located on 135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard. It’s named after Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.
“Arturo Schomburg was a Puerto Rican-born Black bibliophile. He came to America when he was just 17 years old. When he was a young man, he was told Black people had no notable history to speak of, and he kind of spent his life proving that wrong and building vindicating evidence of Black achievement and Black life,” Drayton said.
The Schomburg began as The Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints as a special collection of the New York Public Library’s 135th Street branch. This was important as the Black population grew in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance.
“Arturo Schomburg brought his incredibly rich collection to the library. He brought over 10,000 items, which would grow to the 11 million that we have today,” Drayton said.
I celebrated Schomburg here at Daily Kos in 2018 for Black History Month, and I think it’s about time for a reintroduction—and what better day than on his birthday? He was born Jan. 24, 1874, in Puerto Rico, and joined the ancestors on June 19, 1938.
The relentless attacks on and attempts by Donald Trump and his MAGA minions to erase Black history were powerfully addressed by historian Ibram X. Kendi in a 2025 New York Times op ed. Kendi wrote:
Life is named story. Afterlife is named history. Racist Americans have murdered Black lives and tried to murder Black afterlives, Black stories and Black history, Black storytellers and Black historians. So when Black people die, what we created, what we contributed, what we changed, what we documented dies, too. No funeral. Just gone from memory.
Schomburg’s life was dedicated to ensuring Black history would not only be memorialized, but also celebrated.
The New York Public Library published “Arturo A. Schomburg: His Life and Legacy”:
One of the most influential forces behind the creation of The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is the man the research center is named after, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Born in Puerto Rico in 1874 to a Black mother and a father of German descent, young Arturo often wondered about the lack of African history taught in his classrooms.This interest formed the cornerstone of Schomburg’s eventual lifework consisting of research and preservation—work that would lead him to become one of the world’s premier collectors of Black literature, slave narratives, artwork, and diasporic materials.
During the 1920s and '30s, Schomburg traveled to Europe, Latin America, and across the United States collecting new materials that bolstered his already voluminous collection. In 1926 the Carnegie Corporation funded The New York Public Library’s purchase of Schomburg’s private collection for $10,000. This would mark the beginning of the 135th Street branch’s transformation into the Schomburg Center.
Schomburg’s curation work was so heralded that in 1929, Fisk University President Charles S. Johnson invited him to curate Fisk’s library. By assisting in the architectural design of the library and focusing on providing equitable experiences for researchers, including the building of a reading room and browsing space, Schomburg helped cement Fisk’s standing as one of the leading institutions on Black research and studies. By the time Schomburg ended his tenure at Fisk, the library’s collection had expanded to 4,600 books from a mere 106 items.
I found a few short documentaries on Schomburg on YouTube that are worth watching. Here;’s one from the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute:
Episode two of Nothing About Us Without Us is here! We’re highlighting Afro-Puerto Rican historian, Harlem Renaissance leader, and community builder Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. We’re exploring his contributions to both the Spanish and English-speaking African Diaspora, particularly in New York City during the early 1900s.
From The Root:
Did you know one of the most influential curators of black history was Afro-Puerto Rican? His name is Arturo Schomburg and his work helped create the blueprint of modern black studies.
From The Schomburg Center:
Learn about ways to bring the Schomburg Center’s namesake Arturo A. Schomburg into your classroom lessons.
PBS also covered the bibliophile in “Arturo Schomburg | American Historia: The Untold Story of Latinos”:
Learn about Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, an Afro-Latino activist from Puerto Rico, who began a collection of materials to uplift the African diaspora and helped lay the foundation for the Harlem Renaissance. In this clip from American Historia, explore how Schomburg embraced his identity and causes that he was passionate about, including Puerto Rican and Cuban independence, as well as sharing the rich cultural and intellectual achievements of African Americans from across the globe.
More About This Resource
Prompted by his quest to shed light on Latino heroes, actor and film producer John Leguizamo takes viewers on a journey through history to showcase the often-overlooked contributions of Latino people. In this three-hour docuseries for PBS, Leguizamo is on a mission to share forgotten and rarely told Latino contributions to American history. Because, as he puts it:“If our contributions were written back into history textbooks, can you imagine how America would see us? More importantly, can you imagine how we would see ourselves?”
Schomburg’s name made the news recently when New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was sworn in:
On January 1, 2026, in a historic first, Zohran Kwame Mamdani was sworn in as New York City’s first Muslim mayor, using a Qur’an from the collections of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
[...]
This Qur’an, however, stands apart for its history and restrained simplicity. Copied in Ottoman Syria in the late 18th or early 19th century, it is written primarily in black ink, with red ink used to highlight the structural divisions of the text. The absence of opulent illumination suggests it belonged to an ordinary reader.
This Qur’an was part of the personal library of Arturo A. Schomburg (1874–1938), a leading bibliophile of the African Diaspora, who built a world-class collection documenting the history and culture of people of African descent. Schomburg’s personal collection, including this manuscript, became the basis for the Schomburg Center.
Please join me in the comments section below for more on Arturo Schomburg, and for the weekly Caribbean News Roundup.
