Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library

Where is our historian to give us our side, Arturo asked, to teach our people our own history?

Amid the scholars, poets, authors, and artists of the Harlem Renaissance stood an Afro-Puerto Rican man named Arturo Schomburg. His life's passion was to collect books, letters, music, and art from Africa and the African diaspora in order to bring to light the achievements of people of African descent. When his collection became so large that it threatened to overflow his house, he turned to the New York Public Library.

At the time, the collection, with Schomburg as curator, was the cornerstone of a new Division of Negro History, Literature and Prints. A century later, it is the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture—and a beacon for scholars all over the world.

In luminous paintings and arresting poems, two of children's literature's foremost African-American scholars track the journey of Arturo Schomburg and his quest to correct and expand the historical record for generations to come.