Teaching with the Schomburg Center's Archives: An Introduction from Schomburg Director Joy Bivins

Joy Bivins, Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, shares the goal of Teaching with the Schomburg Center's Archives, an all-new curriculum series introducing students to Black history, experience, and culture through our archives and collections.

Find all units and guides from the curriculum series.

The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” 1925

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg grew up in Puerto Rico wanting to know more about the African side of his family—an aspiration shut down by a teacher who told him that African people had no history worth learning. Many years after this incident, Schomburg met other educators, scholars, and activists with similar desires and created his own collection containing what he called “vindicating evidences” of the contributions of people of African descent to global history and culture. In 1926, his personal collection found a new home at the 135th Street branch of The New York Public Library. Today, this branch is known as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, one of the world’s largest repositories of that evidence, preserving more than 11 million unique historical items related to the global Black experience.

Too many students today continue to be denied access to information about the beauty, joy, and brilliance of the global African diaspora. We catch students asking the same question Arturo Schomburg asked at the end of the 19th century: “When are we going to learn Black History?” We want educators using our curriculum series to feel empowered to answer, “right now!”

That being said, we’re aware educators have little time to conduct extensive archival research on top of their responsibilities—so we want to meet you halfway. For this series, we curated items from our collections that have potential to be relevant and impactful in your middle- and high-school classrooms. As your students explore the curriculum’s themed units, they will be challenged to think critically and creatively about Black history and culture.

These guides are not intended to be comprehensive. Rather, they offer you and your students an invitation to moments of greater curiosity and a window to explore the resources of the Schomburg Center to deepen your understanding of the past. For each guide, we offer three or more archival items: photographs, paintings, formal and informal documents, and more. And for each item, we provide contextual information, ideas from the latest Black Studies scholarship, and suggested discussion questions and activities.

But this curriculum series—cumulatively highlighting only a few dozen items out of millions in the Schomburg archives—can only go so far. 

As a world-renowned archive that is free and open to the public, the Schomburg Center is a unique resource for students of all ages to engage in lifelong learning, inviting you to take your curiosity further, ask more questions, and seek more answers. We want you and your students to understand that this is your archive, your Schomburg Center—a place to forge new meaning and new understandings to tell the stories that can’t be told otherwise. This series is our open invitation for you to join us in that work.

Joy L. Bivins, Director
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Find All Guides from Teaching with the Schomburg Center's Archives 

Grades 7–12

Explore a curriculum series that introduces students to Black history, experience, and culture through the Schomburg Center's archives. Access four all-new curriculum guides now—plus, stay tuned for more!

Discover the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, one of The New York Public Library’s renowned research libraries, is a world-leading cultural institution devoted to the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences.

Explore the Center for Educators & Schools

The New York Public Library’s Center for Educators and Schools is devoted to making all of the Library’s resources accessible and useful for educators. You’ll find programs and services tailored for the educator community, such as book lists, credit-bearing workshops, special access to exhibitions, tips on teaching with primary source materials from our vast research collections, and much more.