The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture was founded in 1925 by Puerto-Rican scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, but 20 years prior the building itself was known as the 135 St. Branch library. The center is located in West Harlem and is open Monday – Saturday from 10am-6pm, offers free admission, and is accommodating to disabilities with wheelchair accessibility and ASL piece translations. The center focuses on African American history and experiences through exhibiting primary and secondary sources such as photographs, cultural pieces, music, and documentaries, of which the center has a total of 11 million items combined amongst their collections. It is broken into five divisions, like the photographs and print and rare books divisions. The center’s mission is to serve its community by educating its wide audience on African American history by offering community events, guided tours, and live productions hosted at their theater.

The Schomburg center has a wide range of items in their collections such as Richard Wright’s novel “Native Son,” Phillis Wheatly’s signed book of poems, original papers from Malcolm X, and African pieces from around the world. Also, a lot of the Schomburg’s collections are available digitally on its research database, which offers manuscripts, books, photographs, and newspapers dating back to the 1800s. Interestingly enough, the Schomburg Center offers online exhibitions, such as the Emmett Till Project, which provides a summary of the trail, photographs of the courtroom, detailed newspaper archives of the event, a podcast that explains his story and murder, and collections of activists and artists literary works such as poems and nonfiction books based on Emmett Till’s death. To conclude, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture offers people accessible digital and physical collections, as well as a database that allows the audience to explore and learn about African American history.