Its storied holdings include Coptic crosses, manuscripts from Malcolm X, papers of Langston Hughes, and sculpture by Augusta Savage. On the evening of the first Wednesday in May, Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (Malcolm X Boulevard at West 135th Street) gave a party to celebrate these holdings and more on its 100th anniversary. The event included a reception, buffet supper, and concert, and a grand time was enjoyed by all.
The focal point was a new exhibition, “100: A Century of Collections, Community, and Creativity,” curated by center director Joy L. Bivins. Accompanied by an audio narrated by Levar Burton, it features just a fraction of the treasures the Schomburg owns, gleaned from an archive of more than 10 million objects.
RELATED: Schomburg Center to celebrate centennial with year-long programming
It all started in 1925, when the New York Public Library opened the Division of Negro Literature, History, and Prints — the forerunner of today’s Schomburg Center — as a research branch. Its holdings grew exponentially the following year. That was when Puerto Rican-born, Black bibliophile, and scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg sold his collection to the library system for $10,000, becoming its founding curator. At 42, scholar Schomburg had spent all his youth in pursuit of rare books, manuscripts, and works of art that he amassed to document and celebrate the attainments and contributions made by Black people to world history and advancement. The Schomburg does tangibly what the film “Sinners” does metaphorically.
Michael Henry Adams photos
Last Wednesday night’s 100th birthday celebration for Schomburg Center in Black Culture. 
Thelma Golden, Ford Foundation director and chief curator of Studio Museum in Harlem. 
Sharon Wilkins 
Dr. Brenda Akin and Dr. Rita Louard 
Robin Bell-Stevens of Jazzmobile. 
Black History authority David Levering Lewis wrote much of “When Harlem Was in Vogue” and met his late wife, Ruthann Stewart, at Schomburg Center. 
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“God’s Child,” a 2009 color screen print on Crescent board by Chicago artist Barbara Jones-Hogu. 
Book cover of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg’s biography. 
Harlem’s Michael Cummings, seen in Schomburg shop, is one of world’s foremost quilt artists. 
Sonia Mendez (seated), Van Vanable, and Judge J. Machelle Sweeting. 
Several former long-time Schomburg staff, such as Sharon Howard, turned out to celebrate. 
Schomburg archivist Mary Yearwood (left) chats with Schomburg Deputy Director Kevin C. Mathews. 
Funded by Works Progress Administration in 1934, Aaron Douglas, Harlem Renaissance’s best-known painter, devised a four-panel mural sequence to decorate Schomburg’s original home, in McKim, Mead & White’s neo-Classical 1905 Carnegie Library building. Douglas’ murals still adorn newer J. Max Bond-designed library reading room today. This panel is entitled “The Negro in an African Setting.”
One of the most reassuring aspects of history can also be, at times, rather frightening: Without little change due to gained insight or greater prudence, things can seem to repeat over and over. Schomburg was only in elementary school when one of his white teachers categorically insisted, “Negros have no accomplishments, heroes, or history.”
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Forming the nucleus of one of the world’s foremost repositories of materials devoted to African American and African Diasporic genius and genesis, led by academicians including Jean Blackwell Hutson, Ruth Ann Stewart, Howard Dobson, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and others, the Schomburg Center offers assistance to tens of thousands yearly from throughout the globe in search of knowledge. If proof positive of Black greatness throughout all time were needed, this assuredly is one place it resides. Happy birthday, Schomburg, and many more! For more info, visit nypl.org.