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Growing up in Puerto Rico in the late 19th century, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg was he said and his teacher that black people had no important history or accomplishments. He spent his life challenging the narrative by collecting art, books and drawings that expressed the opposite. At the age of 17, Schomburg settled in New York, where he used the information he gathered to write articles on black history in publications such as Negro World. In time, he became known as a historian and intellectual of the birth of the Harlem Renaissance.
“The Schomburg has always wanted to collect international events,” said Barrie Brown, the museum’s curator of manuscripts, archives and rare books. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “When you look at his collection, you see his vision of what the African diaspora is… it’s global, it has many languages; there are many different experiences.”
More than 11 million items at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research center of the New York Public Library, detail the injustices that black Americans have faced, and also reflect their culture and history. As the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary this year, Schomburg is also honoring its 100th anniversary. New York Public Library to buy Schomburg’s personal library of 4,600 pamphlets, art and books in 1926. Harlem’s population became predominantly Black by the 1920s, fueling a growing appetite for things by black people. Now, most of the workers at the center who care for and protect the things are women of color. “Schomburg was very much ahead of his time in terms of his collection,” Brown said. “As the current administrator, seeing the importance that others did not, I am proud to continue this tradition today in our past years.”
Materials stored in new York The Public Library’s research center also includes artwork from Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage and items such as author Maya Angelou’s Smith Corona typewriter. Last month, Kassidi Jones, an assistant curator of manuscripts, archives and rare books, held a copy of Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, handwritten on yellow paper. “He starts by hand, and I think that deep acting and deep writing is one of the reasons he’s the legend he is today,” Jones said. “Everything was very well thought out, tweaked, gone through over and over again until it sounded the way he wanted it to.” The Schomburg now has over 840 boxes of Angelou’s manuscripts and personal items, making it their largest organized collection.
Also on the table was an original copy of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, an 1861 memoir by former slave writer Harriet Jacobs, which chronicled the abuse Jacobs faced until she escaped. A revolutionary piece at the time, the book called for white northern women to help settle it. Schomburg discovered it decades later.
“This is the first time you see what slavery is like for a black man,” Brown said of Jacobs’ biography. “He talks about being abused, he talks about being abused, he talks about childbirth, and these are things you don’t see in the news of that time.”
Several items from the Schomburg collection are included Proclaiming America: 1776 and After The exhibition at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A Schwarzman Building is on display until January 10, 2027. Schomburg’s pieces help create a complete picture of the past 250 years, said the center’s director, Joy Bivins: “You cannot fully understand the history of the US without understanding the history of black people and understanding the problems and successes of the people of the United States here in the United States.”
Schomburg staff and Schwarzman management teamed up to identify pieces for the Declaring America exhibit. A student newspaper article called 40 Acres and a Mule, and articles commemorating the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom are part of Schomburg’s contributions. The exhibit also includes broadcasts of a Philadelphia cemetery Decoration Day event in 1870. The precursor to Memorial Day, Decoration Day began in 1865 when black ex-slaves in South Carolina decorated the graves of Union soldiers. Marcus Garvey’s Vitamins, a 1983 sculpture by artist David Hammons, combines political change with the jars of honey and candy often found in a New York bodega.
Along with participating in the Declaring America exhibition, Schomburg is celebrating its centennial through two exhibitions on its premises. 100: 100 Years of Collections, Collections, and Designswhich was on display from 8 May 2025 to 30 June 2026, celebrated Schomburg’s legacy. A replacement visitor’s book lists all the people who visited the library when it first opened, including poet and novelist Langston Hughes. Disclosure and International Disclosurewhich runs until 5 December 2026, includes material from the original Schomburg library. Featured in the exhibit is a miniature Qur’an from the Ottoman Empire that Schomburg lent to the current mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, at his inauguration last January. To celebrate the 100th anniversary, Schomburg staff recently released a list of 100 songs they’ve been saving to cover the last 100 years, such as Billie Holiday and Her Orchestra’s 1939 hit Strange Fruit.
Tammi Lawson, curator of arts and crafts at the Schomburg, said the central offering in the Declaring America exhibit reflects the conflict between violence and hope within the American experiment. “This whole collection is a story against history,” Lawson said in the arts and crafts section. He was surrounded by statues of black people encased in glass and beautiful, abstract images. “Mr. Schomburg collected, and we are still collecting, corroborating evidence.” Our contribution to America is related to the history of America, and this contribution has many elements that reflect its participation, and it fulfills it.
As the division’s presiding officer for nearly 40 years, Lawson has seen the agency change through various reforms; The collection has become more digital and the process has been streamlined. The beauty of the great room where he works every day and expands his knowledge has kept Lawson in Schomburg for many years. “This place gives you your vitamins,” Lawson said. As a black person, even though I grew up proud, this place gave me the tools to realize that many stories about black people are false, and we have things.
After seeing the disparity among Black Women artists, Lawson found a budget to expand their collection. “Black women in the tax department, and the mall or the museum, are underrepresented,” Lawson said. Now the center has a large group of people in the community of Augusta Savage, a sculptor of the Harlem Renaissance. One of Savage’s pieces at the Schomburg is the Garden Figure from 1942, a plaster sculpture of a child with a raised hand, who lives in a small room that is kept permanently at 64F for protection.
Women of color say they identify with products made by women who look like them. A favorite piece among the curator of the collection, Serena Torres, is a jar by the textile artist Lynore Routte called. Weeping Eye Legacy Container for Sorrow. Torres sometimes meditates while holding the jar, releasing his complex thoughts on the object. “I have a lot of grief, and I give it to the ship,” said Torres. “These things have a big meaning and we have to think about them when we do them, we work with them.”
In the future, Lawson would like to see all of Schomburg’s collections continue to show the spread of African countries. He remembered bringing out a carved enema from pre-colonial Africa when he entered in mid-1989. The piece looked more like a sculpture than a Lawson instrument. He said: “It just made me realize that Africans, whatever they do, they decorate it.”
