New York research centre celebrates 100 years of documenting Black culture

It’s one of the largest repositories of Black history in the country – and its most devoted supporters say not enough people know about it.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture hopes to change that Saturday, as it celebrates its centennial with a festival combining two of its marquee annual events.

The Black Comic Book Festival and the Schomburg Literary Festival will run across a full day and will feature readings, panel discussions, workshops, children’s story times, and cosplay, as well as a vendor marketplace. Saturday’s celebration takes over 135th Street in Manhattan between Malcom X and Adam Clayton Powell boulevards.

Founded in New York City during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, the Schomburg Center will spend the next year exhibiting signature objects curated from its massive catalog of Black literature, art, recordings and films.

For the centennial, the Schomburg’s leaders have curated more than 100 objects for an exhibit that tells the story of the center through the objects, people, and the place – the historically Black neighborhood of Harlem – that shaped it.

That includes a visitor register log from 1925-1940 featuring the signatures of Black literary icons and thought leaders, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes and materials from the Fab 5 Freddy collection, documenting hip-hop’s earliest days.

The Schomburg Center contains one of the oldest and largest collections of materials documenting the history and culture of people of African descent. It was founded by Arturo Schomburg, an Afro-Latino historian born to a German father and African mother in Santurce, Puerto Rico.

He was inspired to collect materials on Afro-Latin Americans and African American culture after a teacher told him that Black people lacked major figures and a noteworthy history.

Today, the library serves as a research archive, comprising over 11 million items, including art, artifacts, manuscripts, rare books, photos, moving images, and recorded sound.

Over the years, it has grown in size, from a from a reading room on the third floor to three buildings that include a small theater and an auditorium for public programs, performances and movie screenings.