‘A counter-narrative of history’: Schomburg Center’s 100 years of celebrating Black culture | Black US culture

Growing up in Puerto Rico in the late 19th century, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg was told by his teacher that Black people had no significant history or accomplishments. He spent his life disproving the narrative by collecting art, books and artefacts that showed the opposite. At 17 years old, Schomburg settled in New York, where he used his collections to write articles about Black history for periodicals such as Negro World. In time, he became known as a pre-eminent historian and intellectual of the Harlem Renaissance.

“Schomburg always sought to collect the global Black experience,” said Barrye Brown, curator of manuscripts, archives and rare books at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “When you look at what he was collecting, you see his vision of what the African diaspora is like … it is all around the world, it’s multilingual; there’s so many different experiences represented.”

The more than 11m items at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a New York Public Library research center, detail the injustices that Black Americans have faced, while also showcasing their culture and history. As the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary this year, the Schomburg is also honoring its 100th year of existence. The New York Public Library purchased Schomburg’s personal library of 4,600 pamphlets, artwork and books in 1926. Harlem’s population became primarily Black by the 1920s, ushering in an increased appetite for materials by and about Black people. Now, most of the staff at the center who curate and protect the items are women of color. “Schomburg was just so ahead of his time in terms of his collecting,” said Brown. “As the current curator, seeing value where others did not, I’m very proud to continue that tradition today during our centennial.”

Materials housed in the New York Public Library research center include artwork from the Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage and items such as the author Maya Angelou’s Smith Corona typewriter. Last month, Kassidi Jones, assistant curator of manuscripts, archives and rare books, handled an early manuscript of Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, handwritten on yellow paper. “She would start by hand, and I think that deep engagement and that serious writing practice is part of the reason that she is the legend that she is today,” Jones said. “Everything was so meticulously thought through, it was ruminated over, it was passed over again and again and again until it sounded exactly the way that she wanted.” The Schomburg now has more than 840 boxes of Angelou’s manuscripts and personal items, making it their largest processed collection.

On the table also sat an early copy of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, an 1861 autobiography by the formerly enslaved writer Harriet Jacobs, which described the abuse that Jacobs experienced until she escaped. A revolutionary piece at the time, the book appealed to white northern women to support abolition. Schomburg acquired it decades later.

“This is really the first time that you see a glimpse into what enslavement is like for a Black woman,” Brown said about Jacobs’s autobiography. “She talks about the sexual harassment, she talks about the abuse, she talks about motherhood, and these are things that you’re not seeing in the narratives of that time.”

Several items from the Schomburg’s collection are included in the Declaring America: 1776 and Beyond exhibit at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A Schwarzman Building on display until 10 January 2027. The pieces from the Schomburg help construct a full picture of the past 250 years, said the center’s director, Joy Bivins: “You can’t really understand US history fully without understanding Black history and understanding both the struggles and the triumphs of people of African descent here in the United States.”

Schomburg staff and Schwarzman curators collaborated to identify pieces for the Declaring America exhibit. An issue of a student newspaper called 40 Acres and a Mule, and commemorative prints from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom are part of the Schomburg’s contributions. The exhibit also includes a flyer for Decoration Day events at a Philadelphia cemetery in 1870. A precursor to Memorial Day, Decoration Day originated in 1865 when formerly enslaved Black people in South Carolina adorned the graves of Union soldiers. Marcus Garvey’s Vitamins, a 1983 sculpture by the artist David Hammons, blends political radicalism with honey jars and candy that are customarily found in a New York bodega.

Along with contributing to the Declaring America exhibit, the Schomburg is celebrating its centennial through two exhibits at its own center. 100: A Century of Collections, Community, and Creativity, which was on display from 8 May 2025 until 30 June 2026, celebrated Schomburg’s legacy. A visitor sign-in book reflected all of the people who visited the library when it first opened, including the poet and novelist Langston Hughes. To Uncover and Reveal to the World, which runs until 5 December 2026, includes items from Schomburg’s original library. On display in the exhibit is a small Qu’ran from the Ottoman Empire that the Schomburg loaned to the current New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, during his swearing-in ceremony last January. To celebrate the centennial, Schomburg’s staff recently released a playlist of 100 songs they curated to encapsulate the past 100 years, such as Billie Holiday and Her Orchestra’s 1939 song Strange Fruit.

Tammi Lawson, Schomburg’s art and artefacts curator, said that the center’s contributions to the Declaring America exhibit demonstrated the dichotomy of violence and hope within the American experiment. “This whole collection is a counter-narrative of history,” Lawson said in the center’s art and artefacts division. She was surrounded by sculptures of Black figures encased in glass and colorful, abstract paintings. “Mr Schomburg collected, and we are still collecting, vindicating evidences. Our contributions to America intertwine with American history, and this collection just has a bevy of items that showcases our participation, and it evens it out.”

As the division’s lead curator for nearly 40 years, Lawson has watched the institution transform through various renovations; the collection has become more digitized and processes have streamlined. The beauty of the large room she works in every day and expanding her knowledge has kept Lawson at the Schomburg throughout the years. “This place gives you your vitamins,” Lawson said. “As a Black person, even though I was raised personally to be proud, this place did give me the tools to know that the average narrative about Black people is a lie, and we have things.”

After seeing a gap in pieces by Black women artists, Lawson secured a budget to expand their collection. “Black women in collections, as well as auctions or museums, are really underrepresented,” Lawson said. Now the center has the largest collection in a public institution of Augusta Savage, a sculptor from the Harlem Renaissance. One of Savage’s pieces at the Schomburg is Garden Figure from 1942, a plaster depiction of a child with an upraised hand, which sits in a small room constantly maintained at 64F for preservation purposes.

The women of color staff say that they relate to the items created by women who look like them. The favorite piece at the center of the collection manager, Serena Torres, is the textile artist Lynore Routte’s jar titled Crying Eye Portal Vessel for Transmuting Grief. Torres sometimes meditates as she handles the jar, releasing her own difficult feelings on to the object. “I’ve got a lot of grief, and I give it to the vessel,” Torres said. “These things have so much meaning and we have to think about that as we handle them, as we work with them.”

In the future, Lawson wants to see the entire Schomburg collection continue to demonstrate the expansiveness of the African diaspora. She recalled unpacking a carved enema from pre-colonial central Africa when she joined the center in 1989. The piece looked more like a piece of art than an instrument to Lawson. “It just let me know that Africans, whatever they do,” she said, “they’re making it beautiful.”