‘A counter-narrative of history’: Schomburg Center’s 100 years of celebrating Black culture
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- The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is celebrating 100 years since the New York Public Library purchased founder Arturo Alfonso Schomburg's personal library of 4,600 pamphlets, artwork and books in 1926, and is contributing items to the NYPL's "Declaring America: 1776 and Beyond" exhibit on display through January 10, 2027.
- Arturo Alfonso Schomburg arrived in New York at 17 after being told in Puerto Rico that Black people had no significant history, and built a collection that curator Barrye Brown says reflects a multilingual, worldwide vision of the African diaspora.
- The Schomburg holds more than 840 boxes of Maya Angelou's manuscripts and personal items—its largest processed collection—including an early handwritten draft of "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" on yellow paper that assistant curator Kassidi Jones says reveals her "meticulous" writing practice.
- Curator Tammi Lawson, the division's lead for nearly 40 years, secured a budget to expand representation of Black women artists, and the center now holds the largest public collection of Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage, including her 1942 plaster "Garden Figure" preserved in a room kept at 64°F.
- The center's centennial programming includes two own exhibits—"100: A Century of Collections, Community, and Creativity" (May 8, 2025–June 30, 2026) and "To Uncover and Reveal to the World" (through December 5, 2026)—the latter featuring a small Qu'ran from the Ottoman Empire that the Schomburg loaned to Mayor Zohran Mamdani for his January swearing-in.
- Lawson described the collection as a "counter-narrative of history" containing "vindicating evidences" of Black contributions, an argument the center is staging directly into America's 250th-anniversary moment through a March on Washington print, a 1870 Decoration Day flyer, and David Hammons's 1983 sculpture "Marcus Garvey's Vitamins."
Why it matters: By inserting 11 million items into the nation's 250th anniversary programming, the Schomburg is making the case that Black history is not a sidebar but a corrective to mainstream American narrative—anchored by 840 boxes of Angelou materials and the largest public collection of Augusta Savage, a stake in how the next century of American memory gets written.
