The foremost historian and collector of books on Africans in America, Arturo (Arthur) Alfonso Schomburg, better known as Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, was born on January 24, 1874, in the town of Santurce in the Captaincy General of Puerto Rico (San Juan). While Schomburg was in grade school, one of his teachers claimed that Black people had no history, heroes or accomplishments. Inspired to prove the teacher wrong, Schomburg determined that he would find and document the accomplishments of Africans on their own continent. Schomburg was educated at San Juan's Instituto Popular, where he learned commercial printing.
At St. Thomas College on the island of St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies, he studied Negro literature. Schomburg immigrated to New York City on April 17, 1891, and settled in the Harlem section of Manhattan. Schomburg was a supporter of independence for his native Puerto Rico. Arthur Alfonso Schomburg became a member of the "Revolutionary Committee of Puerto Rico". He also supported Cuba's independence from Spain. He settled into a Puerto Rican enclave of a Cuban area, which was known for its nationalist intellectuals and politically radical cigar workers.
Schomburg continued his studies to untangle the African thread of history in the fabric of the Americas. After experiencing racial discrimination in the US, he began calling himself "Afroborinqueño" which means "Afro-Puerto Rican". Schomburg became involved in the Harlem Renaissance movement, which spread to other African-American communities in the U.S. The concentration of Blacks in Harlem from across the U.S and Caribbean led to a flowering of arts, music, intellectual and political movements. In 1896, Schomburg began teaching Spanish in New York. From 1901 to 1906 Schomburg was employed as messenger and clerk in the law firm of Pryor, Mellis and Harris, New York City.
In 1906, he began working for the Bankers Trust Company. Later, he became a supervisor of the Caribbean and Latin American Mail Section, and held that until he left in 1929. While living in Harlem, Schomburg strengthened his ties with the African American and Afro-Caribbean communities. In 1911, he renamed a lodge of Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants, as Prince Hall Lodge in honor of the first African American freemason. He became the master of the lodge in later that year and the grand secretary of the Grand Lodge of the State of New York in 1918. As a key contributor to the Harlem Renaissance, Schomburg became friends of Alain Locke and Langston Hughes.
Schomburg's civic and intellectual life was driven by his mission to teach, enlighten, and instruct Black people about their own history and achievements. He embarked on the task of collecting books, artworks, manuscripts, rare books, slave narratives, and other artifacts of Black history. He wrote numerous articles and essays. During 1911, Schomburg found the Negro Society for Historical Research, to create an institute to support scholarly efforts. For the first time, it brought together African, West Indian, and Afro-American scholars. He was the co-editor of the 1912 edition of Daniel Alexander Payne Murray's Encyclopedia of the Colored Race. In 1916 Schomburg published what was the first notable bibliography of Black poetry, "A Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry".
In 1914, Schomburg joined the exclusive American Negro Academy, becoming, from 1920 to 1928, the fifth and last President of the organization. Founded in Washington, DC in 1897, this was the first major African American learned society. It brought together scholars, editors, and activists to refute racist scholarship, promote Black claims to individual, social, and political equality. The American Negro Academy, published the history and sociology of African American life. This was a period of the founding of societies to encourage scholarship in African-American history. In 1915, Dr. Carter G. Woodson co-founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and began publishing the "Journal of Negro History".
By the 1920s Schomburg had amassed a collection which consisted of artworks, manuscripts, rare books, slave narratives and other artifacts of Black history. The collection formed the cornerstone of the Library's Division of Negro History at its 135th Street Branch in Harlem. In 1926, the New York Public Library purchased this collection from Schomburg with a $10,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation. The library appointed Schomburg curator of the collection, which was named in his honor: "The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture".
His collection has been a resource for important Black scholars of the Harlem Renaissance era such as W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay. Schomburg used his proceeds from the sale to fund travel to Spain, France, Germany and England, to seek out more pieces of Black history to add to the collection. In 1924, while in Europe, he searched for and acquired valuable information on Negro history. In Seville, Spain, he dug into the original, loosely collected records of the Indies and was able to shed new light on Negro history.
His essay "The Negro Digs Up His Past," which was published in the Survey Graphic of Harlem in March 1925, influenced thousands of students and scholars. In 1929 Fisk University President Charles S. Johnson, then chair of social sciences at Fisk University, invited Schomburg to curate the Negro Collection at the library of Fisk in Nashville, Tennessee. He assisted in the architectural design contributing to the construction of a reading room and browsing space. By the end of Schomburg's tenure at Fisk he had expanded the library's collection from 106 items to 4,600.
During 1932 he traveled to Cuba. While there he met various Cuban artists and writers, and acquired more material for his studies. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg's work served as an inspiration to Puerto Ricans, Latinos and Afro-Americans alike. During the Harlem Renaissance, essayists, artists, writers and others had used Schomburg's materials. The power of knowing about the great contribution that Afro-Latin Americans and Afro-Americans have made to society, helped continuing work and future generations in the Civil Rights movement.
Arthur Alfonso Schomburg was an important intellectual figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He raised awareness of the contributions that Afro-Latin Americans and African Americans have made to society. His journey on his involvement to show that African culture was full of life and to inspire Blacks to write their history about them was his main goal which he successfully accomplished. Arturo (Arthur) Alfonso Schomburg's work served as an inspiration to Puerto Ricans, Latinos and Afro-Americans alike.