Available Now! Get Your Own Special-Edition Schomburg Centennial Library Card

This year, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding! Take home your own piece of Black history with a special-edition library card to mark the occasion. The card features the artwork Rivers by Houston Conwill, with Estella Conwill Majozo and Joseph De Pace, which visitors to the Schomburg Center will recognize as the brass cosmogram that flows across the terrazzo floor of the lobby. 

Find out how to get your Schomburg Centennial library card now. 

Created in honor of both Arturo Schomburg and the poet Langston Hughes, the work was inspired by Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and features the poem inside its design:

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.  

Hughes’s cremated remains are interred beneath the cosmogram’s center. On the posthumous occasion of his 89th birthday, the Schomburg Center hosted a party in his honor where it dedicated its auditorium and unveiled Rivers to the public. Read all about that party, Hughes, and his relationship to the Schomburg Center in some of the books included in our new book list “It Happened in Harlem: Recommended Reading”—which features, among other titles, the children’s book There Was a Party for Langston, by Jason Reynolds—curated by the expert librarians at the Schomburg Center to usher in the start of the centennial celebrations. 

Anyone who lives, works, attends school, or pays property taxes in New York State is eligible to receive the special-edition Schomburg Centennial library card free of charge. Start your library card application online, and come to a branch near you. But keep in mind: this limited-edition card is available on a first-come, first-served basis while supplies last!

This card gives you access to the Schomburg Center’s collections—and everything NYPL has to offer! Explore a world of free resources: millions of books, e-books, audiobooks, newspapers, and databases; the Library’s internationally renowned research collections; free passes to over 100 cultural organizations; streaming documentaries; and much more.