Latest news with #SchomburgCenterforResearchinBlackCulture
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
The home of one of the largest catalogs of Black history turns 100 in New York
NEW YORK -- It's one of the largest repositories of Black history in the country — and its most devoted supporters say not enough people know about it. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture hopes to change that Saturday, as it celebrates its centennial with a festival combining two of its marquee annual events. The Black Comic Book Festival and the Schomburg Literary Festival will run across a full day and will feature readings, panel discussions, workshops, children's story times, and cosplay, as well as a vendor marketplace. Saturday's celebration takes over 135th Street in Manhattan between Malcom X and Adam Clayton Powell boulevards. Founded in New York City during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, the Schomburg Center will spend the next year exhibiting signature objects curated from its massive catalog of Black literature, art, recordings and films. Artists, writers and community leaders have gone the center to be inspired, root their work in a deep understanding of the vastness of the African diaspora, and spread word of the global accomplishments of Black people. It's also the kind of place that, in an era of backlash against race-conscious education and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, exists as a free and accessible branch of the New York Public Library system. It's open to the public during regular business hours, but its acclaimed research division requires an appointment. 'The longevity the Schomburg has invested in preserving the traditions of the Black literary arts is worth celebrating, especially in how it sits in the canon of all the great writers that came beforehand,' said Mahogany Brown, an author and poet-in-residence at the Lincoln Center, who will participate in Saturday's literary festival. For the centennial, the Schomburg's leaders have curated more than 100 items for an exhibition that tells the center's story through the objects, people, and the place — the historically Black neighborhood of Harlem — that shaped it. Those objects include a visitor register log from 1925-1940 featuring the signatures of Black literary icons and thought leaders, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes; materials from the Fab 5 Freddy collection, documenting the earliest days of hip hop; and actor and director Ossie Davis's copy of the 'Purlie Victorious' stage play script. An audio guide to the exhibition has been narrated by actor and literacy advocate LeVar Burton, the former host of the long-running TV show 'Reading Rainbow.' Whether they are new to the center or devoted supporters, visitors to the centennial exhibition will get a broader understanding of the Schomburg's history, the communities it has served, and the people who made it possible, said Joy Bivins, the Director of the Schomburg Center, who curated the centennial collection. 'Visitors will understand how the purposeful preservation of the cultural heritage of people of African descent has generated and fueled creativity across time and disciplines,' Bivins said. Novella Ford, associate director of public programs and exhibitions, said the Schomburg Center approaches its work through a Black lens, focusing on Black being and Black aliveness as it addresses current events, theories, or issues. 'We're constantly connecting the present to the past, always looking back to move forward, and vice versa,' Ford said. Still, many people outside the Schomburg community remain unaware of the center's existence — a concerning reality at a time when the Harlem neighborhood continues to gentrify around it and when the Trump administration is actively working to restrict the kind of race-conscious education and initiatives embedded in the center's mission. 'We amplify scholars of color,' Ford said. 'It's about reawakening. It gives us the tools and the voice to push back by affirming the beauty, complexity, and presence of Black identity.' The Schomburg Center has 11 million items in one of the oldest and largest collections of materials documenting the history and culture of people of African descent. That's a credit to founder Arturo Schomburg, an Afro-Latino historian born to a German father and African mother in Santurce, Puerto Rico. He was inspired to collect materials on Afro-Latin Americans and African American culture after a teacher told him that Black people lacked major figures and a noteworthy history. Schomburg moved to New York in 1891 and, during the height of the Harlem Renaissance in 1926, sold his collection of approximately 4,000 books and pamphlets to the New York Public Library. Selections from Schomburg's personal holdings, known as the seed library, are part of the centennial exhibition. Ernestine Rose, who was the head librarian at the 135th Street branch, and Catherine Latimer, the New York Public Library's first Black librarian, built on Schomburg's donation by documenting Black culture to reflect the neighborhoods around the library. Today, the library serves as a research archive of art, artifacts, manuscripts, rare books, photos, moving images, and recorded sound. Over the years, it has grown in size, from a reading room on the third floor to three buildings that include a small theater and an auditorium for public programs, performances and movie screenings. Tammi Lawson, who has been visiting the Schomburg Center for over 40 years, recently noticed the absence of Black women artists in the center's permanent collection. Now, as the curator of the arts and artifacts division, she is focused on acquiring works by Black women artists from around the world, adding to an already impressive catalog at the center. 'Preserving Black art and artifacts affirms our creativity and our cultural contributions to the world,' Lawson said. 'What makes the Schomburg Center's arts and artifacts division so unique and rare is that we started collecting 50 years before anyone else thought to do it. Therefore, we have the most comprehensive collection of Black art in a public institution.' For years, the Schomburg aimed to uplift New York's Black community through its Junior Scholars Program, a tuition-free program that awards dozens of youth from 6th through 12th grade. The scholars gain access to the center's repository and use it to create a multimedia showcase reflecting the richness, achievements, and struggles of today's Black experience. It's a lesser-known aspect of the Schomburg Center's legacy. That's in part because some in the Harlem community felt a divide between the institution and the neighborhood it purports to serve, said Damond Haynes, a former coordinator of interpretive programs at the center, who also worked with the Junior Scholars Program. But Harlem has changed since Haynes started working for the program about two decades ago. 'The Schomburg was like a castle,' Haynes said. "It was like a church, you know what I mean? Only the members go in. You admire the building.' For those who are exposed to the center's collections, the impact on their sense of self is undeniable, Haynes said. Kids are learning about themselves like Black history scholars, and it's like many families are passing the torch in a right of passage, he said. 'A lot of the teens, the avenues that they pick during the program, media, dance, poetry, visual art, they end up going into those programs,' Haynes said. 'A lot the teens actually find their identity within the program.'
Toronto Star
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Toronto Star
The home of one of the largest catalogs of Black history turns 100 in New York
NEW YORK (AP) — It's one of the largest repositories of Black history in the country — and its most devoted supporters say not enough people know about it. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture hopes to change that Saturday, as it celebrates its centennial with a festival combining two of its marquee annual events. The Black Comic Book Festival and the Schomburg Literary Festival will run across a full day and will feature readings, panel discussions, workshops, children's story times, and cosplay, as well as a vendor marketplace. Saturday's celebration takes over 135th Street in Manhattan between Malcom X and Adam Clayton Powell boulevards.
New York Post
17-05-2025
- General
- New York Post
The lesser-known story of 100K courageous runaway slaves who fled the South via the ‘Blue Highway'
In 1857, an 18-year-old female slave, Lear Green, who had been repeatedly raped and forced into prostitution by her white owner, one James Noble, was surreptitiously placed in a wooden seaman's chest wearing a dress, bonnet and cape and delivered as simple freight on a steamship bound to Philadelphia from the port of Baltimore. To avoid suffocation and starvation, her benefactors covered her with a quilt and put a little pillow in the box for a semblance of comfort, along with a few articles of clothing, a small amount of food, and a bottle of water, before sealing the crate, bound with heavy rope. Eighteen hours later, the steamer arrived in the City of Brotherly Love, and the box was delivered to a family friend's house, where the young stowaway recovered from her arduous journey. 7 During the Civil War, in 1864, enslaved people of all ages left their homes in small watercraft to reach a Union naval vessel in the distance. Harperâs Weekly, April 9, 1864, public domain Lear Green was one of some 100,000 runaway slaves with unimaginable courage, willing to face horrifying cruelty and vicious flogging, who escaped bondage from the antebellum South on ships at sea. The setting for their flights was what became known as the 'Blue Highway,' which ran up and down the Eastern Seaboard and enabled enslaved people to escape as stowaways in below-deck hideaways. They journeyed under wind-filled sails from the Carolinas to the Chesapeake Bay and Boston's harbors three decades before the Civil War. The ocean carried Africans into slavery, and the ocean was also a pathway that transported them to freedom with the assistance of Black sailors and waterfront workers, and sympathetic working-class whites. 'Thousands of people escaped slavery by sea — yet the history books have had little to say about them. Why have these dramatic tales of dockside conspiracies, below-deck hideaways, billowing sails, and ultimately liberation been so rarely told?' asks preeminent maritime scholar Marcus Rediker in his new book, 'Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea' (Viking). The legendary Underground Railway had carried those fleeing bondage in the Deep South through swamps, thickets, forests, and rivers. 7 An image of historian William Still, who chronicled the lives of slaves who escaped by sea. Courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library But the Blue Highway, though far less well-known, was equally important in providing liberty to slaves. 'The maritime system of escape was organized by people who are largely unknown to us — poor people with calloused hands, often nameless in the historical record and therefore unremembered, the wretched of the earth,' writes Rediker. 'They acted out courageous, death-defying stories. They escaped slavery in ingenious ways. Their labor on the docks and ships, with the dynamic political economy of port cities, drove the freedom story.' 7 A placard from Boston in 1851 shamed a wealthy trader who forced a fugitive slave to return to his ownership. Digital Commonwealth, courtesy of the Boston Public Library Enraged owners advertised in port city newspapers when a slave absconded, but shipmasters were expected to police their own ships, and fugitives were able to find their way on board. 'Escaping slavery by sea was an art,' observes the author. It required planning, reading people and situations quickly. Some runaways dressed as gentlemen, while some females disguised themselves as male sailors. 7 A scene from the waterfront at Charleston, SC, in 1853 shows dockworkers — key players on the 'Blue Highway.' public domain A would-be runner had to understand the climate, ecology, and geography of the escape route — and that could mean the difference between life and death. Rediker, the award-winning University of Pittsburgh professor of Atlantic history, anchors his book in a series of extraordinary Blue Highway narratives. Along with Green, there's Moses Roper, who made his first escape in 1834 at age 13 from his enslaver, the brutal cotton planter John Gooch. Repeatedly captured and sent back to his owners, Roper made no less than a dozen more escape attempts over six years — a never-ending cycle of flight, recapture, grisly punishment, and resale. 7 A scene from 1885, when 21 slaves escaped via sea from Norfolk, Va. on a vessel led by Captain James Fountain. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872, public domain 'The slave-owning terrorists 'ploughed' his back with hundreds, perhaps thousands of lashes; crushed his fingernails in a vise; smashed his toenails on an anvil with a hammer; and poured tar on his head and set it on fire,' writes the author. 'They forced him to carry burdensome log chains, wear iron collars, and walk around with heavy bars on his feet.' On his final escape, Roper traveled 350 miles by land and river, from Florida to Savannah, Ga., where he boarded a vessel disguised as a steward. Finally ashore in New York, he escaped the slave catchers crawling the waterfront and made it up the Hudson River to Albany and then overland to Boston with a bounty hunter on his heels. He boarded a ship to Liverpool, where he published an account of his travails that brought him fame as an abolitionist. 7 'Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea,' is written by Marcus Rediker. 7 'Escaping slavery by sea was an art,' observes the author Marcus Rediker. José Luis Silván Sen African American abolitionist William Still interviewed 930 hungry, sick, and penniless runaways, provided them with aid and shelter between 1852 and 1860, and documented their lives. Some had scars from being whipped, bullets fired at them, or suffered horrifying sexual abuse, and 'cruelty too revolting to be published,' Rediker writes. Still, they had the strength to face death and escape being tortured. And they rallied together to help each other. That was Slave Power. 'These fugitives educated Still and the entire American abolitionist movement about the grim realities of the Slave Power,' Rediker writes. Though mostly hidden from history, these brave men and women demonstrated equal doses of resilience and resistance, and ultimately inspired both movement and nation.
The Guardian
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Love endures all, including slavery and the pandemic. I wanted to show how
In early 2020, I made up my mind that I wanted to write a love story. Separated from my family and friends during the height of the pandemic and emotionally raw from living alone, I wanted to write something where I already knew the ending from the beginning: the characters would win. How they got there would be the most difficult part. I was inspired by the oeuvres of Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez, and I wanted my fourth book to be vast in scope, rich in history and intertwined with familial lineages. But the work would demand plot development as well as historical research and I needed someone to help me. I began interviewing assistants and came across a fellow Black female Harlemite from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Immediately, we clicked over a video chat and soon after, she emailed me a document she said I just had to see. The attachment revealed a four-page, cursive letter that dated back to 4 February 1863. Gorgeously maintained and preserved, the letter was written by a woman named Maria who took dictation from an enslaved man named James Tate of West Point, Georgia. The recipient is Tate's wife, Olivia, who is enslaved on another plantation. James tells her that his master has urged him to move on and forget about Olivia, but he's assuring her that he will never do that. This is it, I said to myself. That letter would be the foundation for my next book. Despite James's master having a vested interest in James producing children so that his labor force would be maintained, James would not give up on Olivia. James's body may not have belonged to him, but his heart was his own – something that the plantocracy or the law could not reach. Letter-writing among African American families is a centuries-old tradition. James Tate existed in a pattern of enslaved people who tried to reach their beloveds because stability was a fleeting dream. Whether it was a wife in Texas expressing worry for her husband's military service for his bondsmen enslaver in 1862, or a Charleston-based daughter looking to reunite with her mother in 1867, the Black family has constantly been under threat, their unions neither protected nor acknowledged in a court of law. Nevertheless, they wrote during slavery and wrote some more to find their loved ones after the American civil war. I had done so much research on this delicate part of history that I didn't know how my imagination could recreate it for the book. Then randomly, as I was cleaning my home, I 'saw' him: a Black Union soldier riding gallantly through the fields of Mississippi back to one of the wealthiest slave ports in the US: Natchez. The image came to me so vividly. I imagined what would have been the humidity of that June in 1865 when the war was called, and felt my nose getting irritated from all the weeds that that horse would have had to navigate. I knew the soldier by name: Harrison. He was returning to his beloved, Tirzah, a literate, enslaved woman, because that was his one and only promise to her. But when he returns to the plantation where he once toiled, everyone is gone. The main house is rotting and nothing but the wind passes through the slave cabins. So begins the love story that endures, the zeal that serves as the undercurrent for the tale. As someone who's had a deep fondness for family history, I've often grown frustrated with archives. There's always a missing part: the second half to a document was burned in a fire, another's whereabouts are unknown. Maybe a key detail has been stolen or a line is grotesquely blotted out. A person disappears, a life reassigned to fabulism and hypotheses. I become obsessed with finding hard, definitive facts. My head becomes hot and tense with the dogged persistence that there has to be something there even if the path is circuitous. Every time this trial and error happens, I grieve for the only truth I can count on in my quest: in order for Black life to be animated in this historical research, Black life had to have been valued in the first place. The US is guilty of being an amnesiac herself, her institutions emerging and thriving due to the sacrifice and degradation of an entire race. But the beauty in my disappointment arises when I understand that resilience persists. Love persisted. If it didn't, how could that letter from Georgia have been preserved in a family for more than 150 years, and make its way to the largest repository for African diasporic information in Harlem, and then to me in my quaint apartment that bordered on Central Park? Who knows what kind of difficulties this one family had to withstand in order to not only keep this letter, but also to preserve it. I became inspired all over again once I remembered: I remembered that love had to have existed like this in my family, too, even if there were no letters. If they didn't, how was I even born, much less how did I have the capacity to write this novel? Sign up to The Long Wave Nesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the world after newsletter promotion Now that I am more than a week past the release of Zeal, a sprawling narrative that follows the intergenerational consequences of two enslaved lovers being separated beyond their control, I think about how much further American society has collapsed since last November. The Trump administration is targeting the Smithsonian Institution and Black history is being removed from federal agencies – an erasure from the public sphere. Our accomplishments are being flattened and distorted into rightwing discourse that promotes the idea that we never deserved or worked hard to achieve them. Worst of all, the legacy of slavery, the twists and turns of Black triumph under cruel white supremacy is being either sanitized or outright banned in multiple states. I am afraid that my book will get banned somewhere. I'm afraid of more archives being lost as federal funding gets re-allocated or slashed altogether. What will I do? What must we do as a nation? But then I recall that my body is a living, historical document. Someone was captured from the coasts of Africa, survived the horrific belly of a ship as it traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, labored under the blistering heat in the deep south and continued loving and expanding in the American north. I am here because someone, as the old folks used to say, kept on keeping on. Someone had to have been loved as Harrison or as James Tate had in my own family because that's what kept us alive. Their earnestness carries on throughout generations. For four years of my life, I kept on keeping on beyond the shock of the pandemic. I researched the civil war, reconstruction, the exoduster movement, the Great Migration, the Great Depression, Jim Crow and the Covid era and positioned them as the backdrops of American history as two lovers and their descendants bond, twist, separate and merge under the weight of these periods. I wanted to show how love continues in spite of unnecessary pain and difficulty, in spite of external forces that threatens to break them apart, in spite of everything. I wanted a happy ending because I've seen that love in my own family – I rose up in it. Now, I wanted to deliver that goodness to another reader, while taking them on an adventure. And those types of endings aren't just figments of my imagination. James Tate eventually reunited with Olivia. They are buried in the same cemetery. Side by side. Together. Morgan Jerkins is the author of Zeal: A Novel, available from HarperCollins
Yahoo
15-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
NYC's Schomburg Center celebrating 100 years of Black culture art, history
What began as a small Harlem library addressing the needs of a changing neighborhood has grown into a world-renowned mecca for Black art and thought. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has its roots in the Harlem Renaissance, one of the richest cultural movements in the nation's history. And as it launches into a yearlong celebration of its 100th anniversary, curators and historians are pushing programs focusing on the center's rich legacy and bright future. 'It is hard to overstate the significance of the Schomburg Center,' said Schomburg Center Director Joy Bivins. 'It has provided the evidence scholars and students have needed to understand Black history as global history.' No time is better than Black History Month to underscore that cultural significance, especially when programs promoting diversity, equity and inclusion are under attack from the Trump Administration, supporters of the center said. But the Schomburg has weathered storms before. The center came of age during the 1920s and 1930s amid the Jim Crow segregation laws of the American South and the Great Migration of African Americans to cities in the North. The center hit its stride in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement, dramatically increasing membership of patrons curious about their history and place in the American landscape. The center survived budget cuts of the 1970s, and threats of budget cuts every decade since, rallying year after year for additional funds and space. Schomburg supporters said they are not about to let some executive order targeting diversity programs spoil their celebration, or mission. 'We stay true to our commitments and values,' Bivins said. 'And the cornerstone of our work is making it clear that libraries are for everyone. That is not going to change. Here, we fulfill one of the most crucial linchpins of democracy — access to knowledge.' Indeed, a visit to the center is filled with many lessons and artifacts, from the papers of giants Maya Angelou and James Baldwin to the unpublished last chapter of Malcolm X's consequential autobiography. Among the items on display at the Schomburg Center, at W. 135th St and Malcolm X Blvd., is a copy of actor Ossie Davis' 1965 eulogy of Malcolm X, 'Black Shining Prince,' rare oral histories of former slaves and a digital archive with links to past exhibits. 'The center and its amazing staff stand as a spectacular gem in The New York Public Library system, and we are excited to celebrate this world-class institution together,' said New York Public Library President Anthony W. Marx. 'The Schomburg Center is beloved by scholars, and is a source of inspiration and materials for everyone seeking knowledge about Black history and culture, as well as a living, breathing center of community life in New York City,' Marx said. What we know as the Schomburg Center began at the New York Public Library's 135th St. branch. As Harlem grew, a growing population of Black residents sought books and cultural material that reflected their unique history. Historians point to a trailblazing team of branch librarians including Ernestine Rose and Catherine Latimer — the New York Public Library's first Black librarian — sought to address the needs of a changing neighborhood. Latimer and Rose launched a campaign to collect items that documented the Black experience, an undertaking that involved meetings with local activists including James Weldon Johnson, a writer and composer best known for the song 'Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing,' widely referred to as the Negro national anthem. Among the influencers in those meetings was Arturo Schomburg, a Puerto Rican historian of African descent who, as a young child, often wondered about the lack of African history taught in his classrooms, an interest that formed the cornerstone of his lifework of research and preservation. A sought-after curator, Schomburg joined the library and in 1925 established what would later be called the Division of Negro Literature and History. A year later, Schomburg's collection was purchased by the Carnegie Corporation for the New York Public Library, an assemblage that would become the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 'Schomburg remains a beacon to those who seek to create spaces that reclaim histories that have often been neglected, marginalized, or ignored,' Bivins. said. 'It has also seeded generations of critical scholarship and creativity that help us better understand Black experiences through its commitment to the stewardship of the objects, from text to film, that illustrate how people of African descent have shaped our collective past and continue to impact the present
