Free B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

Street Branch library hosted an exhibition featuring a small assortment of Schomburg’s collection.
There is a Negro exhibit at the New York Public Library
, one report began.
Within a dozen cases there lies the story of a race. A dozen cases, narrow, shallow, compressed and yet through their clear glass tops there shines that which arrests, challenges, commands attention
.
    Writing of that same exhibition, without mentioning that the collection on display was his own, Schomburg issued what may have been a challenge to that old schoolteacher who had robbed him of his claim to history:
    Not long ago, the Public Library of Harlem housed a special exhibition 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.”
    The exhibit was so well received that in 1926 the New York Public Library, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, purchased the entire collection for $10,000. The Schomburg accession included more than 5,000 books, 3,000 rare manuscripts, 2,000 etchings and portraits, clippings albums, and several thousand pamphlets. Among the treasures were original manuscripts of poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar; an original, signed edition of Phillis Wheatley’s poems; and an original proclamation of Haitian independence, signed by Toussaint L’Ouverture.
    Schomburg’s collection was added to the existing holdings atthe 135th Street Branch, forming the New York Public Library’s Division of Negro History, Literature, and Prints. Though he relinquished ownership of his collection, Schomburg did not give up its stewardship or his quest. He continued to acquire items and in 1932 was appointed curator of the Negro Division, overseeing the fulfillment of his vision until his death in 1938.
    The original 135th Street Branch building still stands. It is one of several libraries in Harlem dating back to the philanthropic atonements of the Gilded Age, all funded by Andrew Carnegie and all featuring facades in the Palladian style. The Schomburg Center was enlarged in 1977. The new addition was made to connect to the old building via an atrium, though its style does not at all communicate with the old one—one is a civilizing fantasy of the European Renaissance, the other a purifying fantasy of Afrocentric brutalism. After the library closes in the evening, the upper rooms of the old library remain lit. Walking across 135th Street at night, I am often startled by shadows that can be seen through the ivy-covered windows. They are only busts and statues in a windowsill—their silhouettes throw outlines against the drawn blinds. But at first they look like moving figures, busy in the library after dark.

    Long before Arthur Schomburg dreamed of his library, a retail space of the St. Phillips Apartments, just a few doors away at 135 West 135th Street, housed the first black bookstore in Harlem. George Young’s Book Exchange came to be known as the “ Mecca of Literature Pertaining to Colored People.” A pilgrim there would find nothing less than the holy books of the New Negro—not only histories written by blacks, but also any book the proprietor could find with enlightening references to Africa, which were often written by abolitionists and explorers.
Revealing volumes expressed the consciousness of Africa
and marshaled evidence of early African culture and its significant contribution to Europe and the world in crushing refutation of the racist theories of inequality
. Typical of the bookstore’s offerings were universal histories of black people documented by Joel Augustus Rogers in
From Superman to Man
and by W. E. B. DuBois in
The Negro
. Both titles can still be purchased from Young’s heirs, the West African book vendors who operate from folding tables all along 125th Street. Young was also a publisher, and among the works bearing his imprint was an edition of the inaugural address given by