Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

Activist and scholar

• Born: January 24, 1874
• Birthplace: Santurce, Puerto Rico
• Died: June 10, 1938
• Place of death: Brooklyn, New York

Best known for his extensive collection of African American artifacts, cultural and intellectual contributions to the Harlem Renaissance, and his historical writings on people of the African diaspora, Schomburg introduced to a wide audience the diverse contributions of people of African descent.

Early Life

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (ahr-TEW-roh al-FAHN-soh SHAHM-burg) was born on January 24, 1874, to Maria Josefa and Carlos Federico Schomburg in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His father was a Mestizo merchant of German descent and his mother a freeborn woman of mixed lineage from St. Croix. Schomburg’s parents never married, and when he was very young, his father left the family. Schomburg retained his father’s surname although he was raised by his mother’s family. Very little is known about Schomburg’s background and even less is known about his childhood. He lived in both Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands in his youth and had one sister, Delores Diaz, who was thirteen years his junior.

One pivotal moment in Schomburg’s life reportedly came when he was in grade school. During a history lesson, he challenged his teacher’s claim that African Americans had no culture, no figures of significance, and no historical relevance. Their debate energized Schomburg to prove his teacher wrong and collect evidence of African Americans’ contributions to history and culture. This story, however, might be apocryphal: Some historians have questioned its veracity because children of African descent had limited access to education in Puerto Rico at that time.

Regardless of his motivation, Schomburg began to research the history of African descendants from throughout the world. He later attended the Institute of Popular Teaching, which would become the St. Thomas College, in the Virgin Islands. Records show that he pursued courses in reading, penmanship, sacred history, church history, arithmetic, Spanish grammar, Spanish history, agriculture, and commerce.

In 1891, Schomburg left home to pursue employment opportunities and education in New York City. He settled into a largely Puerto Rican/Cuban neighborhood in lower East Manhattan. He continued his work with the Puerto Rican liberation movement, which had sparked his interest while in the Caribbean. In 1892, Schomburg met Raphael Serra, an activist with a substantial knowledge of Puerto Rico and Cuba who also was an avid collector of newspaper clippings on Puerto Ricans in New York. Serra befriended Schomburg and motivated him to begin archiving. Schomburg also assisted Serra in forming the twenty-three-man organization Las Dos Antillas (the Two Islands), a reference to the Spanish occupation of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Schomburg served as an officer in Las Dos Antillas for four years until 1896, when he briefly relocated to New Orleans to advance the movement. While in New Orleans, he had his first significant encounter with African Americans. He later referred to his time in New Orleans and the African American culture he encountered when visiting a Baptist church and observing the local scene as an “awakening.”

Schomburg returned to New York in 1895 and married Elizabeth Hatcher, an African American woman from Staunton, Virginia. In 1898, Elizabeth gave birth to Maximo Gomez, the first of the couple’s three sons. Arthur Alfonso, Jr., was born one year after Maximo, and Kingsley Guarionex was born in 1900. That same year, Elizabeth died. In 1902, the widower Schomburg married another African American woman, Elizabeth Morrow Taylor of Williamsburg, North Carolina. She died in 1907 after giving birth to two sons, Reginald Stanfield and Nathaniel Jose. Schomburg left his five children with members of their mothers’ families in New Jersey, Tennessee, and Virginia. Schomburg married again in 1911. His last wife, Elizabeth Green, bore Schomburg three more children: Fernando in 1912; Dolores Marie, his only daughter, in 1914; and Placido Carlos in 1916.

Schomburg was rarely at home. His job as a clerk-messenger at the New York law firm Pryor, Mellis, and Harris, then as a mail-room supervisor at a bank, along with his duties as the grand secretary of the Grand Lodge of New York, kept him away from his family for long periods of time. He continued to collect books, paintings, articles, and other artifacts related to black history and culture. He eventually accumulated so many works that he had nowhere to store them in his home.

Many historians believe that traveling through the segregated South to visit his children led Schomburg to change his focus from the revolution in Cuba and Puerto Rico to the struggle for equality for African Americans. Others speculate that his focus shifted when he married African American women and established himself as an American citizen, thus decreasing his interest in the unrealistic idea of armed struggle in the islands. Another theory holds that Schomburg’s relationship with Prince Hall Freemasonry and his friend John Edward Bruce shifted his focus from revolts in the islands to civil rights and the Harlem Renaissance. This paradigm shift was accompanied by a change in his name to its Anglicized version, Arthur.

Life’s Work

After abandoning his quest for Cuban and Puerto Rican liberation, Schomburg began to focus on American civil rights issues. His focus led him into a friendship with Bruce, who became his lifelong mentor and confidant. In 1911, Bruce and Schomburg cofounded the Negro Society for Historical Research. They both agreed with Marcus Garvey’s “back to Africa” sentiments. Schomburg became a close friend of Garvey and openly supported him amid allegations of financial impropriety at Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. However, Schomburg also agreed with W. E. B. Du Bois’s advocacy of integration for African Americans.

Assuming the presidency of the American Negro Academy (ANA) in 1920, Schomburg collected hundreds of books and artifacts from black academics. He eventually came into conflict with Carter G. Woodson when Woodson, a former member of the ANA, left to found the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). Many members of ASNLH felt that Schomburg and the ANA were too radical. Because of Schomburg’s job commitments, he missed many out-of-town meetings, prompting some members of the group to call for his resignation.

Schomburg wrote for both The Crisis and Opportunity, two of the most influential magazines of the Harlem Renaissance era. Although he only had a high school education, he was accepted in the most elite academic circles. He helped many of the key figures of the Harlem Renaissance, such as writers Claude McKay and Paul Laurence Dunbar. In 1925, Schomburg published his best-known literary work, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” a chapter in Alain Locke’s critically acclaimed work The New Negro. That same year, he won the prestigious Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

In 1926, Schomburg offered his collection of African American artifacts and writings to the New York chapter of the National Urban League, but the organization was unable to afford his asking price. The New York Public Library bought the collection for ten thousand dollars and named it the Arthur A. Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature and Art. In 1927, Schomburg received the Harmon Award for his work in education. In 1930, he retired and took a job as the curator of the Cravath Memorial Museum at Fisk University. Two years later, Schomburg returned to a Great Depression-ravaged Harlem, where he held the title of curator for the Schomburg collection until his death in 1938.

Significance

An ardent reader of history books, Schomburg came across a book by historian Hubert Bancroft titled Retrospection (1912). Its chapter titled “Asia and Africa in America” proclaimed the inferiority of people of Asian and African descent and lamented their effects on American society. Schomburg was so enraged by the book that he copied many offensive passages onto two typed pages and, at the bottom of the second page, wrote: “Where are our Negro historians, our defenders who have let Bancroft commit such a dastardly crime against the Negro race?” Schomburg spent his entire life challenging stereotypes, confronting miseducation and misconceptions, and encouraging others to do the same. His efforts to foster a common consciousness within people of African descent became the ideological foundation for the Harlem Renaissance.

Bibliography

Dodson, Howard, Christopher Moore, and Roberta Yancy. The Black New Yorkers: The Schomburg Illustrated Chronology—Four Hundred Years of African American History. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000. Chronology of African Americans in New York and their migration throughout the five boroughs. Includes the story of the rise of Harlem in the early twentieth century.

Meehan, Kevin. “Vested in the Anonymous Thousands: Arthur A. Schomburg as Decolonizing Historian.” In People Get Ready: African American and Caribbean Cultural Exchange. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Scholarly chapter examining the cultural and political implications of Schomburg’s work, demonstrating how he challenged the racist claims of white historians.

Schomburg, Arthur A., comp. A Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry. New York: Cornell University Library, 1916. Originally released by Schomburg himself, this book is a compilation of black poets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Sinnette, Elinor Des Verney. Arthur Alfonso Schomburg: Black Bibliophile and Collector. Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1989. This book recounts in great detail the life and times of Schomburg through letters and other primary sources.

Wesley, Dorothy Porter, and Arthur A. Schomburg. North American Negro Poets: A Bibliographical Checklist of Their Writings, 1760-1944. Hattiesburg, Miss.: The Book Farm, 1945. Expansion of Schomburg’s Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry listing books, pamphlets, and anthologies by author.