“Loyal,” “compassionate,” “kindred spirit,” common sense;” these are some of the term with which David L. Lewis describes Arthur Schomburg in his When Harlem Was in Vogue. Lewis also refers to Schomburg’s expertise as a bibliophile as “amateur familiarity with the written record of the African past” (125). This is an understatement for a man who contributed in so many ways to the Harlem movement.

From his early desire to dig up his African ancestors’ achievements, Schomburg had been a pioneer on the idea of racial uplift. Schomburg advocated the creation of a chair of Negro history in black institutions capable of balancing and vindicating the omissions of white history: “The white institutions have their chair of history,” he writes in “Racial Integrity, “it is the history of their people and whenever the Negro is mentioned in the text books it dwindles down to a foot note” (18). In this same speech, delivered in 1913 to a group of African American teachers, Schomburg, as Victoria Ortiz affirms, outlines “the intellectual foundations of the period known as the Harlem or Black Renaissance” (45) when he says he is there “with a sincere desire to awaken the sensibilities, to kindle the dormant fibres in the soul, and to fire…racial patriotism by the study of…Negro books…It is the reason for us to devote our time in kindling the torches that will inspire us to racial integrity” (Schomburg 5-6 in Ortiz 45).

Without the passionate Afro-centrism of Marcus Garvey, the impulsive radicalism of Langston Hughes or Jean Toomer or the snobbish academicism of W.E.B. Du Bois, Schomburg’s ideas were more practical and inclusive, less elitist (without necessarily denying his own social aspirations) or confrontational. Ideas like these would be only partially accepted in Harlem’s exclusivist and nationalistic atmosphere. Schomburg knew that many Harlemites, especially Du Bois’s followers and other civil right leaders, did not look with good eyes on the protagonist role some foreign Negroes (especially West-Indians) wanted to play within the African American movement. West Indians had become numerous and influential in the Harlem community and had proved to be very successful in business.

In terms of leadership, West Indians were also becoming a threat for some African Americans. Garvey’s UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association), founded in 1914, had begun to assemble multiple voices and interests creating conflicts within the African American movement and influential Harlemites. According to David L. Lewis, “in ‘respectable’ circles, Garveyites were commonly referred to as ‘outlaws’ and UNIA rendered as ‘ugliest negroes in America’” (37).

By becoming a valuable personage, Schomburg knew how to profit from Harlem’s effervescent literary environment, full of artists desirous to explore African themes. Through his invaluable collection of more than ten thousand pieces of “African descendant literature and artifacts, including more than five thousand rare and unique editions, three thousand autographed manuscripts, two thousand etchings, and several thousand pamphlets” (Biddle in Tolson 10), Arthur Schomburg allowed African Americans to realize that their history was neither limited to America nor framed by slavery. As John Henrik Clarke put it, Africans “had made great nations and … had destroyed some. [They] had been both the masters and the slaves. Slavery was only one part of [their] history” (5).

As patients consult their doctor, Harlem artists consulted Schomburg as the most reliable source of African history. “Schomburg provided information from both his encyclopedic knowledge and his private collection. He was much sought after, and his home in Kosciusko Street became a popular gathering place” (Sinnette 108). When the collection was moved to the library due in part to lack of space at Schomburg’s home, Harlem’s artists moved with it. “Zora Neale Hurston…like other cultivated blacks… frequented the 135th Street Library […] which became, in the words of one contemporary, ‘the great gathering place for all the people of the Renaissance” (Hart 620). Even Du Bois, “who…would not accept [Schomburg] as a colleague because he had no degree” (Hoffnung-Garskof 16), frequently required Schomburg for “specific documentation” (Sinnette 109).

Schomburg’s influence on some Harlem writers was not only in the form of patronage. His ideas permeate the works of Hughes, McKay, and others. His affinity with McKay was not merely based on their “common Caribbean background,” but also on their approach to black consciousness and “their similar reaction to the blatant racism they encounter in the United States” (Sinnette 116). McKay’s favorable statements about Jews in Home to Harlem can be a resonance of Schomburg’s words in “Racial Integrity:” “The Negro must strive to follow the good examples of the Jews—they cling to their customs and traditions, no matter whether they live in Timbuctoo or in the highest peaks of the Andean mountains” (6-7). McKay respected Schomburg to the utmost; his critiques of Home to Harlem were the only ones McKay “graciously accepted;” to other critics, McKay viciously lashed out (122). Unlike McKay, Schomburg believed in the positive side to Harlem; a promising side authors should have exploited. He also believed that writers should not write for money; sensational novels written only to please an audience did but little for the black people and their art (idem).

But, not only did Schomburg care about the major literary and cultural movement, he also cared about the apparently trivial and more neglected literary genre: children’s books. Schomburg, along with James Weldon Johnson are said to be “two of the main supporters of the children’s book collection” of the 135th street Branch Library (Tolson 11-12). Not only were children’s books about African Americans scarce, Tolson affirms, but the few available portrayed stereotypical, decadent African Americans that gave black children a null or distorted sense of history and identity. Schomburg became, thus, part of the project Augusta Baker initiated in the late 30s to “remove negative depictions of servile, impoverished African Americans from library shelves” (16).

Schomburg’s concern with the African American cause distanced him from his fellow Puerto Ricans who wrongly believed he was renouncing his heritage. It is possible that Schomburg had initially idolatrized black North Americans as superiors or more advanced (Hoffnung-Garskof 10), but eventually he became more skeptical of the idea shared even by black intellectuals in Cuba about an “international racial unity under North American leadership” (idem). Also, the fact that Schomburg chose the Negro social circle to achieve his personal goals did not help to reconcile with his fellow countrymen. However, Schomburg did not join “the graduates” class represented by W.E.B Du Bois; instead he looked for his equally experienced middle class fellows and the Masonic avenue became his ladder for social uplift (16).

Paradoxically, when Schomburg was appointed temporarily as librarian of his own collection in 1932, DuBois and his followers complained. “A piece in the AfroAmerican clarified Du Bois’ position as not opposed to Schomburg per se, but in advocacy of black librarians in the NYPL, which this group thought Schomburg’s temporary appointment threatened” (Sanchez 258). That is, Schomburg was still an outsider, no matter how much he had contributed to the African American cause; he was still a foreigner, black but a foreigner yet. While Schomburg’s private collection was still his, yet he generously made it accessible to Harlemites, he was counted as one African American, but once the collection belonged to the city the snobbery of the New York Black society made them forget that some of them were also of mixed blood and Schomburg was once more victim of racism and his foreignness started to emerge as an inconvenience.

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Works Cited or Consulted

Hart, Robert C. “Black-White Literary Relation in the Harlem Renaissance.” African Literature 44 (1973): 612-28.

Hoffnung-Garskof, Jesse. “The Migration of Arturo Schomburg: On Being Antillano, Negro, and Puerto Rican in New York 1891-1938.” Journal of American Ethnicity History 21 (2001): 3-49.

Lewis, David L. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

Lewis, Earl. “To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas.” The American Historical Review 100 (1995): 765-87.

Ortiz, Victoria. The Legacy of Arthur A. Schomburg. A Celebration of the Past, a Vision of the Future. The Schomburg Collection Endowment Fund. The New York Public Library, 1986.

Sanchez Gonzalez, Lisa. “Modernism and Boricua Literature: A Reconsideration of Arturo Schomburg and William Carlos Williams.”

Sinnette, Elinor Des Verney. Arthur Alonso Schomburg, Black Bibliophile & Collector. A Biography. Detroit: Wayne, 1989.

Tolson, Nancy. “Making Books Available: The Role of Early Libraries, Librarians, and Booksellers in the Promotion of African American Children’s Literature.” African American Review 32 (1998): 9-16.

“Harlem timeline.” CHICO. School of Information, University of Michigan
http://www.si.umich.edu/CHICO/Harlem/timex/timeline.html November, 2003

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