Created By: Columbia University
Follow the wall to the entrance of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (515 Malcolm X Blvd.) on Lenox/Malcolm X Blvd. Pause to view the Schomburg's current exhibitions and the resting place of Langston Hughes' ashes in the library atrium.
When the New York Public Library erected a building on West 135th Street in 1905, the new branch was not intended to become the world’s premier research center for Black culture.
Ernestine Rose, a white librarian from rural Long Island, steered the branch’s attention towards preserving Black culture. In 1920, she took it upon herself to racially integrate the library’s staff. She and the first African American librarians hired by the NYPL-- three women, Catherine Latimer, Roberta Bosely, and Sadie Peterson Delaney, the founder of bibliotherapy-- collaborated to showcase African American arts and literacy within Harlem. By 1924, Rose began acquiring rare books and collections with Harlem Renaissance luminaries like James Weldon Johnson, Hubert Henry Harrison, and Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.
In Rose’s view, the separate-but-equal policy that segregated library staffs and patrons was detrimental to American cultural progress because segregation kept brilliant artists and writers of different races from interacting with each other. In May 1923, Rose said in Harlem’s historic Black newspaper, The New York Amsterdam News: “[i]t is by the contact of individual with individual, the acquaintance of one person with another, that all prejudice, personal or social, breaks down. I should accept branch libraries for the colored Negro schools, and specialized Negro institutions, only in case they do not limit within their own narrow walks the opportunity of the colored worker or the colored student to reach out into the whole wide field of human work and human knowledge.”
In her book, The Public Library in American Life, published by Columbia University in 1954, Rose presented the Schomburg Library in Harlem as exemplifying the special potential libraries have for cultivating art and literature in marginalized communities: “Librarians,” she said, “still differ considerably in their attitude toward taking so lively a part in the so-called social field. Many say that the library should remain a library pure and simple and not try to become a social settlement. Others insist that libraries must learn new ways of implementing their service to fill modern social needs and are ready to defend any type of activity from this point of view.”
A bibliophile of Puerto Rican and African American descent, Arturo Schomburg donated 5,000 works to Rose that he had collected around the world over thirty-five years. He believed archives had the power to reevaluate history. He said: “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. History must restore what slavery took away.” The library was renamed for him in 1972 and relocated to a new building, today’s Schomburg Center, in 1980.
Today the Schomburg Center remains an unsurpassed repository of 10 million objects venerating Black literature, arts, politics, culture, and history. The library also continues its tradition of fostering social change in Harlem; one of its most recent endeavors, the “In the Life Archive,” is collecting oral histories from queer senior citizens of color about the discrimination they have faced in their families. The queer poet Langston Hughes' ashes are also interred under a commemorative mosaic at the entrance of the library's auditorium.
This point of interest is part of the tour: Harlem Memory Walk
Please send change requests to changerequest@pocketsights.com.