1924: A Year in the Life of Future Schomburg Center Founder Arturo Schomburg

Two thousand and twenty-four marks the 150th birthday of the founder of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture: Arturo Schomburg.

Laura Helton, assistant professor of English and History at the University of Delaware and 2020 alumna of the Center’s Scholars-in-Residence Program, and Vanessa K. Valdés, author of Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Schomburg and associate provost at The City College of New York, offer a revealing look at his life a century ago at age 50.

For Mr. Schomburg, the year 1924 saw the death of his longtime mentor, an increasing urgency to find a permanent home for a collection of materials highlighting the people and history of the African diaspora—and new beginnings.

Mr. Schomburg (January 24, 1874–June 10, 1938) was twice widowed and had been married to his third wife, Elizabeth Green, for a decade. The couple and their children Fernando Alfonso, Dolores Maria, and Carlos Plácido lived in Brooklyn. Mr. Schomburg was also father to Arturo Alfonso, Jr. and Kingsley Guarionex through his first marriage to Elizabeth Hatcher in 1895. His first-born child Máximo Gómez with Hatcher died a few months after his birth in 1897. Sons Reginald Stanfield and Nathaniel José came from his second marriage to Elizabeth Morrow Taylor in 1902. 

Mr. Schomburg was an established name in academic, political, literary, and journalism circles. He contributed his writings to publications such as Champion magazine (1917), Marcus Garvey’s Negro World (1922), the NAACP’s The Crisis (beginning in 1911), and “Letter to the Editor” in The New York Times (beginning in 1901).

Friends such as writer James Weldon Johnson and historian Carter G. Woodson traveled to his Brooklyn home to borrow books from his vast collection of texts, manuscripts, and more documenting the activists, artists, and scholars of the African Diaspora.

“Between family responsibilities and his dedicated commitments to giving back to his people, to The Race, there were a great many pulls on his time and he was trying his best to respond to each of them,” Valdés said. 

On August 7, his friend and mentor John Edward Bruce died. The two first met in the 1890s or early 1900s. It was one of Mr. Schomburg’s longest standing friendships. 

“When he met Bruce at the turn of the century, it was a turning point in Schomburg’s life,” Helton said. “His mother had died. His first wife died. He lost a child. The revolutionary community that had welcomed him to New York was splintering by 1898. Bruce helped him write a new chapter.”

Mr. Schomburg, who was born in Puerto Rico, was of Puerto Rican and African descent. He arrived in New York City in 1891. He co-founded the political club Las Dos Antillas in 1892. It provided money and medical supplies to assist the activists working for independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spanish colonial rule. The club disbanded following the U.S.'s victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898. 

Mr. Bruce took Mr. Schomburg under his wing and introduced him to Black intellectuals and bibliophiles around New York through clubs and literary societies, Helton added. During her fellowship in the Scholars-in-Residence Program, she studied the collections and writings of Mr. Schomburg. Helton's research will be part of her upcoming book Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History.  

Born enslaved in 1856, Mr. Bruce described himself as a self-taught man. A noted historian, journalist, and editor, he contributed to outlets such as The New York Times, New York Herald, Washington Evening Star, The South African Spectator, and The Jamaica Advocate of Kingston, Jamaica. He also founded The Argus, a weekly sheet in Washington, D.C., and other publications spanning the 1870s through early 1900s.

Both were also members of organizations such as the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge 38 in Brooklyn and the American Negro Academy. Mr. Bruce sponsored Mr. Schomburg’s membership. 

In 1911, the two founded the Negro Society for Historical Research. They acquired books, manuscripts, pamphlets, and more documenting the histories of people across the African Diaspora—amassing over 3,000 objects. They, their friends, and their families stored the items in their homes. Over the years, there were increasing requests to find a permanent location.

“They dreamed of how to make the society’s collection public and to find an institutional home for it,” Helton said. “They experimented with ways to do that for the next decade and a half. But, their plans never quite came to fruition before Bruce died.”

Mr. Bruce’s widow, Florence, gifted Mr. Schomburg with many of her late husband’s books. The action added additional urgency to Mr. Schomburg’s quest to find a permanent home for all of the items plus honor the legacy and work of his mentor. 

“You might think of 1924 as setting the stage for how Schomburg’s collection came to Harlem, and for how he became so closely linked in the popular imagination to the Harlem Renaissance,” Helton said.

The Harlem Renaissance spanned the late 1910s through the mid 1930s. It was a period of great creativity and output of works in Black art, music, literature, and academia.

In March, Mr. Schomburg attended a dinner planned by Charles S. Johnson, creator and editor of Opportunity magazine and future president of Fisk University, to honor poet, writer, and educator Jessie Redmon Fauset, Valdés said. 

“His efforts would bear fruit only a couple of years later,” she added.

The evening’s conversations set the stage for Survey Graphic’s 1925 issue "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro". It included one of Mr. Schomburg’s most well-known writings, “The Negro Digs Up His Past.” The essay also honors Mr. Bruce. Other contributors included legendary names such as poets Langston Hughes and Anne Spencer, writers Claude McKay and Jean Toomer, and historian W.E.B. Du Bois. Dr. Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes Scholar, served as the guest editor.

Locke also edited The New Negro: An Interpretation, which contained many of the materials in Survey Graphic plus new content. He stated in his November 1925 Foreword that his goal was to document Black people culturally and socially plus "register the transformation of the inner and outer life of the Negro in America that have so significantly taken place in the last few years."

"For Mr. Schomburg, the inclusion of 'The Negro Digs Up His Past' in both the Survey Graphic issue and The New Negro anthology expanded the reach of his work," Valdés said. "Whereas the issue was thought to be specifically tied to Harlem, at least in spirit, the book meant that he would have even greater national reach."

"The events of 1924 weren't the beginning of these relationships between Locke, Schomburg, and the 135th Street branch library—more like a crescendo, a moment when everything fell into place," Helton said. "Schomburg's presence at the Opportunity dinner, and his inclusion in both the Survey Graphic issue and the ensuing anthology The New Negro, made these longstanding ties more visible and public—and cemented the association between Schomburg and the idea of the Harlem Renaissance."

Ernestine Rose, branch librarian at The New York Public Library’s 135th Street Library in Harlem, sent a letter to Mr. Schomburg inviting him to a meeting “for the purpose of proceeding with forming a ‘Department of Negro Literature and Art'" in October.

The meetings that followed and the Citizens Committee, which Mr. Schomburg was a part of, established what was later called the Division of Negro Literature and History. It opened in 1925. The department would undergo a few name changes over the years.

The relationships that developed from that dinner later provided support for finding a permanent home for the collection materials. Johnson—Mr. Schomburg’s dinner host—later became one of three members of the National Urban League who brokered the purchase of Mr. Schomburg’s collection by the Carnegie Corporation in 1926 for The New York Public Library, according to Elinor Des Verney Sinnette’s book Arthur Alfonso Schomburg: Black Bibliophile & Collector.

His items became the foundational collection for what is today the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a library that stewards over 11 million objects.

In 1932, The New York Public Library hired Mr. Schomburg as the curator of the Division of Negro Literature and Art at the 135th Street Library. He worked there until his death in 1938.

The division was renamed the Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature, History and Prints in 1940 in his honor. It was the forerunner to today’s Schomburg Center.