Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, a Black Puerto Rican who came to New York at seventeen, spent four decades gathering books, manuscripts, and art that proved the depth of African and diasporic history against those who denied it existed. Working as a bank clerk, he assembled one of the great private libraries of Black history; its purchase by the New York Public Library in 1926 created the core of what is now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.
At a Glance
- Born
- 24 January 1874, San Juan, Puerto Rico
- Died
- 10 June 1938, Brooklyn, New York
- Birth name
- Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
- Known for
- The Schomburg Collection, acquired by the New York Public Library in 1926; “The Negro Digs Up His Past” (1925); co-founding the Negro Society for Historical Research (1911)
- HBCU ties
- Fisk University (Curator of the Negro collection at the Fisk University library, 1931–1932)
- Fields
- Education · Literature · Organizing
- Era
- Turn of the Century
Early Life
Schomburg was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on 24 January 1874, to María Josefa, a free Black woman from St. Croix in the Danish West Indies, and Carlos Federico Schomburg, a merchant of German descent. His parents never married, and he was raised largely by his mother’s family, spending part of his youth in the Virgin Islands, where he attended school in St. Thomas.
Schomburg later told of a schoolteacher in Puerto Rico who claimed that Black people had no history, no heroes, and no great moments, and he presented his life’s work as the answer. Some historians have questioned whether the episode happened as he told it, but it captured the conviction that drove him. As a young man he was also drawn into the movement for Cuban and Puerto Rican independence from Spain.
Life and Work
Schomburg arrived in New York City in 1891, at seventeen. He settled among the city’s Cuban and Puerto Rican exiles, and in 1892 helped found Las Dos Antillas, a political club working for the independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico, serving as its secretary until 1896. He joined Prince Hall Freemasonry, eventually rising to grand secretary of its Grand Lodge of New York, and the friendships he made there drew him into Black American intellectual life. As his focus shifted from Caribbean independence to Black history in the United States, he increasingly used the anglicized name Arthur. He married three times, in 1895, 1902, and 1911, and had eight children; his first two wives, both African American women from the South, died young.
From 1901 to 1906 Schomburg worked as a messenger for a Manhattan law firm, and in 1906 he joined the Bankers Trust Company, where he rose to supervise the foreign mail section before retiring for health reasons in 1929. His salary financed his collecting. In 1911 he and the journalist John Edward Bruce founded the Negro Society for Historical Research, and in 1920 he became president of the American Negro Academy, the learned society founded by Alexander Crummell. In 1916 he published A Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry, and he wrote on the history of the African diaspora for The Crisis, Opportunity, Negro World, and other Black periodicals.
His best-known essay, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” appeared in the March 1925 Harlem issue of Survey Graphic and was reprinted in Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro the same year. It argued that a documented history was not a luxury for Black Americans but a necessity, and it became a manifesto for the historical side of the Harlem Renaissance. Its anger had deep roots: years earlier Schomburg had typed out racist passages from the historian Hubert Howe Bancroft and asked at the foot of the page where the Negro historians were who should have answered them. That year the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, under librarian Ernestine Rose, opened a Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints, drawing on loans from Schomburg and other collectors.
In May 1926 the New York Public Library purchased Schomburg’s collection with a $10,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and deposited it at the 135th Street Branch. It was reported to include some 5,000 books, 3,000 manuscripts, 2,000 etchings and paintings, and thousands of pamphlets. Schomburg used part of the proceeds to travel to Spain, France, Germany, and England in search of more material, including records of Black figures in European history.
From 1931 to 1932 Schomburg served as curator of the Negro collection at Fisk University’s library in Nashville. He then returned to Harlem to become curator of the collection that bore his name at the 135th Street Branch, serving from 1932 until his death. He continued to acquire material, and the branch’s reading room became a meeting place for the writers, artists, and scholars of Depression-era Harlem. In 1934 Aaron Douglas painted his mural series Aspects of Negro Life for the branch, and Schomburg worked beneath the panels, which he said he could look up to for support when visitors of the so-called superior race came to inspect the collection.
“The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.”
Legacy
Schomburg died in Brooklyn on 10 June 1938. In 1940 the library renamed the division the Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature, History and Prints in his honor. In 1972 it became one of the New York Public Library’s research libraries, and as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture it now holds more than 11 million items, including the papers of James Baldwin and a long-lost chapter of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Schomburg is remembered as a model of the self-taught scholar. Without a university post, he insisted that collecting and preserving evidence was itself a political act. His Afro-Latino identity, long overlooked in accounts that anglicized his name, is now central to how scholars understand him, as a figure who linked Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Black America.
Collecting and preserving records is itself a historical act: Schomburg gathered the evidence that Black people had a history worth studying, and in doing so changed what historians could write. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 24 January 1874 Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
- 1891 Arrives in New York City.
- 1892 Helps found Las Dos Antillas, a club for Cuban and Puerto Rican independence.
- 1906 Joins the Bankers Trust Company, where he works until 1929.
- 1911 Co-founds the Negro Society for Historical Research with John Edward Bruce.
- 1920 Becomes president of the American Negro Academy.
- March 1925 Publishes “The Negro Digs Up His Past” in Survey Graphic.
- May 1926 New York Public Library acquires his collection with a Carnegie Corporation grant.
- 1932 Becomes curator of the Schomburg Collection at the 135th Street Branch.
- 10 June 1938 Dies in Brooklyn, New York.
Sources and Further Reading
- Elinor Des Verney Sinnette, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg: Black Bibliophile & Collector (New York: New York Public Library; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989).
- Vanessa K. Valdés, Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017).
- Arthur A. Schomburg, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925).
- New York Public Library, “Arturo (Arthur) Schomburg Research Guide.” Link
- Carnegie Corporation of New York, “Harlem’s Schomburg Center: Celebrating the History and Culture of the Black Experience.” Link
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