Schomburg Center

One of the world’s great libraries of Black history, grown from one man’s collection

Local name: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Collection: Harlem and Upper Manhattan · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The former 135th Street branch library, where the collection began · Mcmillin24, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research library of the New York Public Library. It all began in the pale three-story building on 135th Street. That is a former branch library. It was built in 1904 and 1905 to a design by Charles McKim, with money from the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. In 1920 the librarian Ernestine Rose came to work here. Harlem was becoming a Black neighborhood, and she began collecting books on Black history and literature. In 1925 a special division was opened for them. And in 1926 the library acquired the collection of Arthur Schomburg, bought for ten thousand dollars given by the Carnegie Corporation. Schomburg was born in Puerto Rico in 1874 and came to New York in 1891. All his life he set out to disprove a schoolteacher who had told him that Black people had no history. His collection held more than five thousand books, three thousand manuscripts and two thousand prints. From 1932 Schomburg himself was the curator of his collection here, and he worked until his death in 1938. During the Harlem Renaissance the library became the neighborhood’s cultural center. The historian W. E. B. Du Bois and the anthropologist Franz Boas lectured here. The American Negro Theatre played in the basement, and the young Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier were members of its company. In 1980 the center moved into a new building on the corner of Lenox Avenue, and in 1981 the old one became a city landmark.

Visiting

515 Malcolm X Boulevard (Lenox Avenue), at 135th Street. Subway: the 2 or 3 train to 135th Street, which exits right by the center. The center is open to everyone and hosts exhibitions and events. Opening hours are on the New York Public Library’s website, nypl.org.