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Authors: Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

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Readers at work in the Schomburg Room of the 135th Street branch library, ca. 1926. (Courtesy of New York Public Library Archives, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations)

By the time this mania for the black past was unfolding at the 135th Street Branch library, Arthur Schomburg was already a noted bibliophile, well known for the breadth and value of his collection and the ardor with which he pursued it. Schomburg belonged to a circle of “race men” who were also book fiends, sharing and trading recent acquisitions. Before there was such a thing as the New Negro movement, he had cofounded the Negro Society for Historical Research, was a member of the Negro Book Collectors Exchange, and had served as president of the American Negro Academy. These organizations were all ambitious in their aims, and they were all short-lived, but their existence tells us much about the spirit of their age. The desire of these men to uncover the forgotten history of black people was matched by a desire to protect and steward that knowledge.

The books and documents Schomburg and his colleagues hunted were precious, and they had to compete with better-funded white collectors. According to one account, Schomburg once refused to sell his collection to a wealthy white man because the prospective buyer wouldn’t reveal his plans for the materials. Upon learning that many white institutions had impressive collections of historic black books, Schomburg wrote to a friend,
You would be surprised
to know that libraries in the South who bar the Negro’s admittance have a large amount of his literature
.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg was a native of Puerto Rico, born to a German father and a black mother.
His interest in black history was sparked
when a teacher told him that black people had no history. By the time he was living in Brooklyn and making a respectable, middle-class living as a mail clerk at a bank, he was still passionately attempting to refute that charge. Schomburg was said to have a magic sense that guided his quest for new material, spending his lunch hours and weekends digging through New York’s antiquarian bookstores. In his search for treasures, Schomburg corresponded with other collectors around the country and abroad, including Haiti and Liberia. He drafted friends into his research, sending requests to travelers like James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Alain Locke when they were just about to depart for sojourns in Europe. He also traveled around the country, partly because of his duties as a Freemason.

In addition to collecting, Schomburg produced monographs and papers on neglected black figures from world history. His pamphlet
Is Hayti Decadent?
investigated the political situation of that country leading up to and in the midst of the American occupation. He researched and wrote of notable men of African descent who made important but sometimes forgotten contributions to world history, including the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, the Guadeloupe-born composer and courtier; Antonio Maceo, a
black officer in the struggle for Cuban independence from Spain; Alessandro, the Florentine duke who was known as “the Negro Medici”; and Leo Africanus, the Moorish geographer from Granada, a place Schomburg visited during his only journey to Europe.

In 1925, the 135th Street Branch library hosted an exhibition featuring a small assortment of Schomburg’s collection.
There is a Negro exhibit
at the New York Public Library
, one report began.
Within a dozen cases there lies the story of a race. A dozen cases, narrow, shallow, compressed and yet through their clear glass tops there shines that which arrests, challenges, commands attention
.

Writing of that same exhibition, without mentioning that the collection on display was his own, Schomburg issued what may have been a challenge to that old schoolteacher who had robbed him of his claim to history:

Not long ago, the Public Library of Harlem
housed a special exhibition of books, pamphlets, prints and old engravings, that simply said, to skeptic and believer alike, to scholar and schoolchild, to proud black and astonished white, “Here is the evidence.”

The exhibit was so well received that in 1926 the New York Public Library, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, purchased the entire collection for $10,000. The Schomburg accession included more than 5,000 books, 3,000 rare manuscripts, 2,000 etchings and portraits, clippings albums, and several thousand pamphlets. Among the treasures were original manuscripts of poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar; an original, signed edition of Phillis Wheatley’s poems; and an original proclamation of Haitian independence, signed by Toussaint L’Ouverture.

Schomburg’s collection was added to the existing holdings at
the 135th Street Branch, forming the New York Public Library’s Division of Negro History, Literature, and Prints. Though he relinquished ownership of his collection, Schomburg did not give up its stewardship or his quest. He continued to acquire items and in 1932 was appointed curator of the Negro Division, overseeing the fulfillment of his vision until his death in 1938.

The original 135th Street Branch building still stands. It is one of several libraries in Harlem dating back to the philanthropic atonements of the Gilded Age, all funded by Andrew Carnegie and all featuring facades in the Palladian style. The Schomburg Center was enlarged in 1977. The new addition was made to connect to the old building via an atrium, though its style does not at all communicate with the old one—one is a civilizing fantasy of the European Renaissance, the other a purifying fantasy of Afrocentric brutalism. After the library closes in the evening, the upper rooms of the old library remain lit. Walking across 135th Street at night, I am often startled by shadows that can be seen through the ivy-covered windows. They are only busts and statues in a windowsill—their silhouettes throw outlines against the drawn blinds. But at first they look like moving figures, busy in the library after dark.

Long before Arthur Schomburg dreamed of his library, a retail space of the St. Phillips Apartments, just a few doors away at 135 West 135th Street, housed the first black bookstore in Harlem. George Young’s Book Exchange came to be known as the “
Mecca of Literature
Pertaining to Colored People.” A pilgrim there would find nothing less than the holy books of the New Negro—not only histories written by blacks, but also any book the proprietor could find with enlightening references to Africa, which were often written by abolitionists and explorers.
Revealing volumes expressed the consciousness of Africa
and marshaled evidence of early African culture and its significant contribution to Europe and the world in crushing refutation of the racist theories of inequality
. Typical of the bookstore’s offerings were universal histories of black people documented by Joel Augustus Rogers in
From Superman to Man
and by W. E. B. DuBois in
The Negro
. Both titles can still be purchased from Young’s heirs, the West African book vendors who operate from folding tables all along 125th Street. Young was also a publisher, and among the works bearing his imprint was an edition of the inaugural address given by Edwin Wilmot Blyden on January 5, 1881, at his swearing-in as president of Liberia College; William Lloyd Garrison’s treatise on
The loyalty and devotion of colored Americans in the revolution and war of 1812;
and
The mote and the beam: an epic on sex-relationship ’twixt white and Black in British South Africa
.

A few decades later, Lewis Michaux opened his National Memorial African Bookstore at the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. Signs above its storefront, captured in many photographs, blared its significance as the “House of Common Sense,” the “Home of Proper Propaganda,” and the “World History Book Outlet on 2,000,000,000 (Two Billion) Africans and Non-White Peoples.” An American flag was placed out front, and so was a sign urging passersby to “Register Here,” for it was also the “Repatriation Headquarters for the Back to Africa Movement.” The area in front of Michaux’s bookstore was called Harlem Square; it was the starting point or endpoint of many street marches and a place where rallies convened and impromptu street speakers held court.

Michaux’s iconic bookstore is gone, but when I arrived in Harlem another famous destination for black thought was still in existence. Liberation Bookstore, at the corner of 131st and Lenox, dates back to the late 1960s. Its proprietor, Una Mulzac, recalled
to a journalist the trouble brought on by her store’s name.
When I first thought of opening a bookstore
and calling it “Liberation” I met with a lot of comments and discouragement from certain people about the name. They said I shouldn’t call it liberation. I would be inviting trouble, I should name it after myself or my father or just call it “Bookstore
.”

My father remembers making special trips to New York to visit the shop during his college days. I passed it many times before I ever went in—often the door was locked, and it seemed to operate on an irregular schedule. When I finally did visit, I found the elderly Ms. Mulzac minding the store alone. She was happy to have a visitor and make conversation, and she was still fiercely dedicated to propagating the knowledge whose importance blared on several posters decorating the store windows and facade. By the time I returned there, the irregular business hours of the bookstore had apparently ceased altogether. I heard that Ms. Mulzac was ill and noticed piles of mail accumulating in a heap inside the door. I copied down the words from signs in the windows and the titles of books that could be seen through the glass. Later I passed and saw a small hole in the window, surrounded by the spiderweb pattern of shattered glass. I heard a rumor that all the books inside were going to be sold off. Soon the old, faded sign was whitewashed, and someone made a half-hearted attempt to cover the windows with newspaper. But the books remained inside, untouched, for a long while to come.

Now, when I go to the library, I do not make such a tortuous journey. I live just minutes away, and it is not even necessary to turn a corner. One of the security guards, Mr. Kingston, always greets me with kind words and a smile. When I leave, he bids me good-bye with a wish for safe travels. Once I told him it would only be two blocks before I reached my door, and he said he wished me safety all the same.

Some time passed before I knew Julius Bobby Nelson by name. This is because when I first arrived on Lenox Avenue, I did not know anyone and was not known by anyone. When I passed into and out of my front door, the people standing at my stoop would part to let me enter and part to let me leave. For a long time, little was exchanged between us except
excuse me
and
thank you.
I didn’t know who they were or where they lived, these older people who stood facing Lenox Avenue during the day, or the younger ones who came at night to guard the same spots. But they seemed to belong there more than I did, provoking in me the impulse to apologize for my presence at my own front door. I was not used to living in the middle of it all, right there on the avenue with only the thinnest of veils to pass through before meeting the world.

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