Arthur Schomburg

Arthur Schomburg (1874-1938) was the head of the mailroom at Bankers Trust on Wall Street in New York City from 1908 to 1929. After work, uptown, he was a figure of the Harlem Renaissance. He began what became the Schomburg Center in Harlem.

He gathered books, pamphlets, manuscripts, pictures, magazine and newspaper articles, even Zulu nursery rhymes, everything he could find to piece together the record of black history. Not just black history in the United States, but throughout the African Diaspora and in Africa itself. Without him much of this material would have been lost to time.

It began when he was a boy in Porto Rico. People told him that black people had no history, no achievements, that they were nothing. He set out to prove them wrong. It became his life’s work. It took him even to Europe. In Seville in the south of Spain he saw the government records of the early days of Spanish rule of the West Indies – back when black slavery began! He found out that Spain had had black painters and black professors. It seems he never went to Africa, though he did have material from there.

Schomburg was not interested in history as propaganda. It was the very thing he was fighting against:

“The blatant Caucasian racialist with his theories and assumptions of race superiority and dominance has in turn bred his Ethiopian counterpart – the rash and rabid amateur who has glibly tried to prove half the world’s geniuses to have been Negroes and to trace the pedigree of nineteenth century Americans from the Queen of Sheba.”

and:

“an ounce of fact is worth a pound of controversy.”

He also understood that Caucasian racialists had already allowed for Exceptional Negroes in their picture of the world.

By 1925, thanks to Schomburg and others of like mind, the Public Library in Harlem (now the Schomburg Center) had:

“a special exhibit of books, pamphlets, prints and old engravings, that simply said, to skeptic and believer alike, to scholar and schoolchild, to proud black and astonished white, ‘Here is the evidence.’ Assembled from the rapidly growing collections of the leading Negro book-collectors and research societies, there were in these cases, materials not only for the first true writing of Negro history, but for the rewriting of many important paragraphs of our common American history.”

It even had poems from the 1700s written by Phyllis Wheatley in her own handwriting!

Blacks needed to know their history:

“Though it is orthodox to think of America as the one country where it is unnecessary to have a past, what is a luxury for the nation as a whole becomes a prime necessity for the Negro. For him, a group tradition must supply compensation for persecution, and pride of race is the antidote for prejudice. History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generation must repair and offset.”

– Abagond, 2017.

Sources: “The Negro Digs Up His Past” (1925) by Arthur Schomburg; “World’s Great Men of Color” (1946) by J.A. Rogers.

See also:

• Not in H.G. Wells:
  • Harlem
  • Phyllis Wheatley
  • Caucasian racialism in the United States
  • Exceptional Negroes
  • African Diaspora
• The history of black history

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