Arthur Schomberg

When he was in grade school, a teacher told Arturo Alfonso Schomburg that people of color had no history, accomplishments or heroes. Schomburg, who was born in Puerto Rico but whose mother hailed from the West Indies and his father of German ancestry, was determined to prove his teacher wrong.

And he did.

For nearly four decades, Schomburg observed, researched, wrote and recorded the contributions that not only African Americans made to society, but those also made by African-Latino Americans.

He collected countless pieces of African history over the years, including slave narratives, art and literature, and is considered a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, an intellectual, social and artistic explosion of people of color in the Harlem section of New York City in the 1920s.

Hailed worldwide

Schomburg’s collection of manuscripts, rare books and other artifacts was considered one of the finest in the country and Schomburg was hailed worldwide as a leading source of black history.

In 1926, Schomburg sold his collection of African history to the New York City Public Library for $10,000, and it became the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the library’s Harlem branch.

The library later appointed Schomburg as curator of the collection; Schomburg used the proceeds from the sale to travel to Spain, France, Germany and England to seek more pieces of black history to add to the collection.

“We need the historian and philosopher to give us with trenchant pen, the story of our forefathers, and let our soul and body, with phosphorescent light, brighten the chasm that separates us,” Schomburg said. “We should cling to them just as blood is thicker than water.”

Schomburg was educated at San Juan’s Instituto Popular in Puerto Rico, where he learned commercial printing. He studied black literature at St. Thomas College on the island of St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies.

Education . . . success for all people

He believed that education was the avenue to success for all people.

“The modern school without systematic lectures turns out many graduates who lack retention,” Schomburg said of education. “No sooner has the sound of the world left their teachers lips, the subject has been forgotten.”

Schomburg settled in Harlem in 1891 and worked as a teacher and a messenger before beginning his intellectual work of writing about Caribbean and African American history. His first known article, "Is Hayti Decadent?", was published in 1904 in The Unique Advertiser. In 1909, he wrote Placido, a Cuban Martyr, a short pamphlet about the poet and independence fighter Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés.

In 1916 Schomburg published what was the first notable bibliography of African American poetry, A Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry.

In March 1925, Schomburg published his essay "The Negro Digs Up His Past" in an issue of Survey Graphic devoted to the intellectual life of Harlem. The article had widespread distribution and was well-received. The self-taught historian John Henrik Clarke was so inspired by the essay that at the age 17 he left home in Columbus, Ga., to seek out Schomburg to further his studies in African history. Alain Locke included the essay in his edited collection The New Negro.

Schomburg died in 1938 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City and buried in Cypress Hill. He was 64.

Despite being of mixed ancestry, scholar Molefi Kete Asante in 2002 named Schomburg to the list of 100 Greatest African Americans.