Even on an ordinary day, walking into the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem can feel like walking into a shrine.
The ashes of the poet Langston Hughes are buried under the lobby floor, and its reading rooms hold one of the world’s leading collections of material relating to the African diaspora — more than 11 million items.
But on a morning last month, the vibe was more joyful noise than hush. When the doors opened, a group of African drummers led a procession of several hundred people into the lobby, where the Rev. Nafisa Sharriff, an interfaith minister, stood on the mosaic of the cosmos inspired by one of Hughes’s poems to deliver a blessing.
It was 100 years to the day since the Schomburg’s forerunner, the Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints, opened. And it was the kickoff to a year of celebrations, which continue this Saturday with the Schomburg Centennial Festival, a day of literary and cultural events, culminating with an outdoor block party featuring a performance by Slick Rick.
It’s a celebratory moment for the Schomburg, but also a fraught one. In recent months, the Trump administration has slashed federal funding for libraries, museums and humanities scholarship as part of a pivot toward what the president is calling patriotic history. And his broadsides against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — along with more targeted attacks on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture — have left many Black institutions feeling both defiant and deeply uncertain.
For Joy Bivins, the Schomburg’s director, celebrating Black culture amid efforts to erase it is a back-to-the-future moment.
“This history of our people has always been about trying to cut off the oxygen, cut off the air,” she said at the opening event.
“That’s why we remain important,” she continued. “Because we are always trying to create more space for people to breathe.”
The origin story of the Schomburg Center is intertwined with the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black artists (and librarians) who turned the neighborhood into an artistic crucible and global symbol of creative ferment.
Nella Larsen, the author of the novel “Passing,” was a librarian there, and writers and artists like Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay and Jacob Lawrence frequented the reading room. In the 1940s its basement auditorium was home to the American Negro Theater, where performers including Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee got their start.
But if there’s a presiding spirit, it’s Arturo Schomburg, the pioneering Afro-Latino bibliophile who sold his 10,000-item collection to the library in 1926.
“Mr. Schomburg,” as he’s still called here, never forgot how a teacher had told him that Black people had no history and no cultural achievements worth knowing about. His life’s work, he later wrote, was to gather “vindicating evidences” to the contrary.
In a 1925 essay, Schomburg summed up his credo: “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.”
“100: A Century of Collections, Community and Creativity,” an exhibition which runs until June 30, 2026, presents a wide-ranging sampling of that evidence, from a 1773 volume of poems by Phillis Wheatley, the first American of African descent to publish a book, to a pair of Jean-Michel Basquiat-themed sneakers that once belonged to the artist and rap impresario Fred Braithwaite, better known as Fab 5 Freddy.
At the heart of the exhibit, in a space in the center’s original building that housed the reading room, is a gallery meant to evoke its atmosphere, complete with artworks that were on display there. A latticelike structure in the center of the room, meant to evoke bookshelves, holds items relating to the center’s own history, like inscribed volumes from Schomburg’s original library and the guest book from opening day.
Around the outer edges are manuscripts and other artifacts from some of the towering figures whose archives are held at the Schomburg, including James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Lorraine Hansberry and Maya Angelou, and art works from its collection by Lawrence, Augusta Savage and others.
But the exhibition also highlights how curators worked to gather records of ordinary Black people that were often overlooked in mainstream collections.
In the 1940s, Lawrence D. Reddick, who led the Schomburg from 1939 to 1948, spearheaded an effort to gather letters Black soldiers sent home during World War II. “Thousands of these letters are necessary so that a true history of the Negro in the war can be written,” he said in an appeal published in Black newspapers across the country.
Sometimes, collection building had a more literal whiff of finding buried treasure. One vitrine chronicles the discovery in the 1980s of a group of trunks abandoned in a basement of a once-fashionable building on nearby Edgecombe Avenue, which turned out to include a rich trove of letters, photos and memorabilia from famous and ordinary residents from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Next to the main gallery, a smaller one pays tribute to the wonkier aspects of librarianship, and the corps of librarians, archivists and curators who helped gather the often scattered traces of Black life into a findable — and searchable — record, through scrapbooks, clipping files and bibliographies.
Today, as at all the New York Public Library’s research collections, the Schomburg’s holdings are open to anyone with a library card.
“You don’t have to be an art historian or a museum professional to get an appointment here,” Tammi Lawson, the curator of art and artifacts, said. “You can be little Shamiqua from the projects down the street, working on a paper on Romare Bearden.”
During the May event, at a panel discussion of former Schomburg directors, the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad, who led the center from 2010 to 2016, spoke of tensions when he arrived between the center and some in the broader community, who thought the center had lost touch.
As director, he said, he had worked to bring more young people into the Schomburg, and to connect it with the growing national conversation around the Black Lives Matter movement.
“To me, that’s what this place has always been about — artistic and activist knowledge,” Muhammad said.
Those old tensions may seem quaint amid the current political backlash, which has left many scholars in Black studies feeling vulnerable. “Our entire ecosystem is under attack,” Muhammad said.
Financially, the Schomburg may be more protected than most. The New York Public Library gets less than 1 percent of its budget from federal grant funding, and is not currently seeking any new federal grants, according to a spokesman.
For Bivins, the Schomburg’s mission remains rooted in what it started with: the gathering, and sharing, of evidence.
“The materials, the collections, the strivings represented by the collections — that makes me feel alive,” she said.
Jennifer Schuessler is a reporter for the Culture section of The Times who covers intellectual life and the world of ideas.
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