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Arturo (Arthur) Alfonso Schomburg |
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(1874-1938)
bibliophile, historian, writer, collector, curator
Arthur Schomburg is best known for collecting books and other documents of the African diaspora that now reside at the Harlem center that bears his name.
By all rights, February ought to be a month when Arthur Schomburg is especially well remembered.
It is Black History Month, and no one did more than Schomburg, who died in 1938, to collect black history and provide black people throughout the world with documentary evidence of who they are. His extraordinary legacy -- the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem-- is the world's foremost archive of the African diaspora.
And yet Schomburg remains in the rear tier of black history heroes, little known and often mistaken, on the strength of his name and a stereotype, to have been a Jewish philanthropist who endowed the collection.
More the pity, for the true story of Arthur Schomburg's identity is intriguing.
He was African American, a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. He was Puerto Rican born and raised, intensely involved in both the Puerto Rican and Cuban independence movements. He was a son of St. Croix, his mother's native land, living for a while as a young man in the Virgin Islands.
And he was, in ideology and purpose, a pioneering Pan-Africanist, conceiving, connecting and archiving the history of African peoples across boundaries of nation, culture and language, extending the understanding of blackness in America to a place before slavery and beyond the borders of the United States.
More remarkable, he did it all without academic credentials, on his own time, with mostly his own money while working 23 years for Bankers Trust Company in New York, and rising to a supervisory position in the foreign correspondence section of the mail room. He retired at the end of 1929 with an annual pension of $1,243.66.
"He was looking for his identity," said Elinor Des Verney Sinnette, and in the process "he did a hell of a job documenting the history of black people all over the world."
Sinnette, a retired librarian at Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, is the author of the 1989 book "Arthur Alfonso Schomburg: Black Bibliophile & Collector," his only full-length biography.
Schomburg was born in Puerto Rico in 1874. In the most popular version of his defining moment, a fifth-grade teacher told him that black people were without history, heroes or great moments. He determined he would gather the evidence to prove otherwise.
In 1891, at the age of 17, he moved to New York. It was in 1925, in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance, that he wrote the essay, "The Negro Digs Up His Past," in which he most famously laid out his guiding rationale.
"The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future," Schomburg wrote. "Though it is orthodox to think of America as the one country where it is unnecessary to have a past, what is a luxury for the nation as a whole becomes a prime social necessity for the Negro. For him, a group tradition must supply compensation for persecution, and pride of race the antidote for prejudice. History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset."
In 1926, the New York Public Library, with a $10,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation, bought Schomburg's collection and the following year opened it to the public at the 135th Street Branch Library.
Sixty-five years after Schomburg's death at age 64, the themes of his life and work seem remarkably current, proof of the porousness of what are too often regarded as ironclad categories of race, ethnicity and culture.
Schomburg was the forerunner of a more fluid and mixed identity now very much in vogue. Forgotten as he may be by the broader public, he is fought over by a new wave of scholars who each "desire to claim bragging rights over Schomburg's memory," as Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, who teaches Latino studies at the University of Michigan, put it in a 2001 paper in the Journal of American Ethnic History.
Schomburg, according to Sinnette, referred to himself as an Afroborinqueno, a Puerto Rican of African descent, but today scholars comb his life for clues of shifting allegiances.
They study his causes, clubs, Masonic affiliations, heroes and friendships, the neighborhoods he lived in, the books he collected, the places he traveled, the music he appreciated, the food he loved. They note his disillusion and disgust with the course of Cuban and Puerto Rican nationalist politics, and his disdain for the clannishness of black artists in New York who snubbed the Cuban painter who Schomburg hosted at his home for nearly a year.
They point out that he married three successive African American women. (All named Elizabeth, the first two died while married to Schomburg, the third survived him). They observe that he gave all but one of his eight children Spanish first or middle names, but that he did not want them to speak Spanish. They puzzle over the identity of his father, and pay close attention to how he signed his name.
"Blacks call him Arthur," said Angelo Falcon, the president of the Institute for Puerto Rican Policy in New York. "We call him Arturo (his given name)."
"Everyone wants to claim him for their own cultural, intellectual or historical purposes," said Lisa Sanchez Gonzalez, an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who wrote about Schomburg in her 2001 book, "Boricua Literature: Writings of the Puerto Rican Disapora."
"I think Schomburg would be laughing and happy that the African-American and Puerto Rican communities are fighting over who he belongs to the most," said Sanchez Gonzalez. "In his lifetime I think he felt rejected by both."
As his biography suggests, Schomburg not only catalogued the African diaspora, he lived it in ways that American conventions of race-counting have always had trouble capturing.
Earlier this year the Census Bureau recorded that Hispanics, as of July 2001, were for the first time more numerous than blacks in America (unless you included in the black count those who considered themselves both black and some other race, in which case that total still exceeded the tally of those identifying as Hispanics -- which is considered by the Census not a race but an ethnicity or ancestry). But Schomburg offers vivid evidence that then, as now, people can be both Hispanic and black. According to those 2001 estimates, some 1.5 million Americans describe themselves as both and are counted in both columns in reckoning which minority is the largest.
In strongly asserting both identities, said Miriam Jimenez Roman, the assistant director of the scholars-in-residence program at the Schomburg Center, Arthur Schomburg was ahead of his time.
In his book "Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America," Winston James quotes Schomburg's close friend, the Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay, writing in 1940 that blacks in Harlem cannot "comprehend the brown Puerto Rican rejecting the appellation `Negro,' and preferring to remain Puerto Rican. He is resentful of the superior attitude of the Negroid Puerto Rican."
But Schomburg was not like that. He readily identified as black.
"The key to the singularity of Schomburg as a Puerto Rican black nationalist lies in his un-Puerto Rican family background," writes James, who believes that was primarily because Schomburg was raised by his mother, a non-Hispanic black migrant worker from St. Croix. "It now appears that the non-Hispanic heritage was equally strong, if not stronger than, the Hispanic one."
By contrast, Sanchez Gonzalez, in making the case for Schomburg's enduring Puerto Ricanness, notes how, toward the end of his life, W.E.B. DuBois and others in Harlem's African American intelligentsia, sought to block Schomburg's appointment as curator of his own collection, by then owned by the New York Public Library. Contemporary accounts in black newspapers in Harlem suggest that "despite his reputation as the premier African Diaspora archivist, Schomburg was still deemed an outsider in New York City's African American intellectual politics."
Hoffnung-Garskof steers a middle course, arguing that while Schomburg's cultural straddle no doubt caused him some hurt, his ability to cross those lines, back and forth, was critical to his success.
Where everyone agrees is on the indispensability of the archives that Schomburg created.
"There is no other center like it in the world in the range and richness of its collection," said Winston James. "And it is unparalleled largely due to Schomburg's rather wide interests."
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