Why was Arturo “Arthur” Schomburg have such a passion for collecting books about Black people?
Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, Schomburg famously spent 20 years traveling the world to track down manuscripts, books, and artifacts documenting the roles Black people have played in world history. On May 7, 1926, the New York Public Library purchased Schomburg’s collection.
A century later, on May 7, 2026, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture opened “To Uncover and Reveal to the World: Arturo Schomburg’s Library,” a new exhibition that points to what compelled Arturo “Arthur” Schomburg to become so passionate about collecting books about Black people.
The exhibition, curated by University of Delaware historian Dr. Laura E. Helton, runs through Dec 5, 2026, and showcases 100 original objects from that collection. The exhibit gives visitors a sense of how vast and prolific Schomburg’s collecting was –– and how what he assembled became one of the world’s greatest public archives of African diasporic life.
Some of the items on view include displays of Schomburg’s distinctive bookplate, featuring an owl and the Masonic Eye of Providence, which he used to stamp his collected artifacts. A copy of the 1885 pamphlet “Ecos del alma” by the Afro Cuban journalist and revolutionary Rafael Serra.
A copy of René Maran’s 1921 novel “Batouala.” Copies of books inscribed to Schomburg by authors like Claude McKay, Matthew A. Henson (who wrote about his journey to the North Pole), William H. Ferris, and Eric Walrond. And an image of the parlor room in Yonkers, New York, where Florence and John Edward Bruce held Negro Society for Historical Research meetings.
The parlor, a placard in the exhibit states that this room, “was richly decorated with paintings, portraits of Black leaders, and African carvings, including a Yoruba Gelede mask. Above the fireplace hung a historic map of Africa by a French cartographer – one of the first drawings to accurately depict the continent’s coordinates. [And] a framed copy of the Society’s logo featuring three Egyptian motifs: the Sphinx, a pyramid, and a palm tree.”
Before he could house his collection at the library, Schomburg kept it at his home. The exhibition notes that Schomburg lived at 63 West 140th Street in Harlem and, by 1918, at 105 Kosciuszko Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Visitors described his home as filled with books “from the cellar to the top floor, in every room, including the bathroom.”
When Schomburg died in 1938, the 4,600 items the library bought weren’t cataloged, and items from the original collection began to blend with later acquisitions. Only recently did researchers find a 30-page typescript in Nashville’s Fisk University Archives titled “Library of Arthur A. Schomburg: Collection of Books on the Negro Race, Slavery, Emancipation, West Indies, South America, and Africa” that delineated the original collection.
Jonathan Blanc/NYPL photos
Entrance to Schomburg Center’s “To Uncover and Reveal to the World: Arturo Schomburg’s Library” exhibit Credit: Jonathan Blanc/NYPL 
Jan. 17, 1927, New York Amsterdam News article that heralded the establishment of the Schomburg collection Credit: Jonathan Blanc/NYPL 
Schomburg’s distinctive bookplate, featuring an owl and the Masonic Eye of Providence. Credit: Jonathan Blanc/NYPL 
Copy of A Negro Explorer at the North Pole (Karen Juanita Carrillo photo) 
Books on view at new Schomburg exhibit Credit: Jonathan Blanc/NYPL 
The Schomburg Center’s “To Uncover and Reveal to the World” exhibit also prominently features the Jan. 17, 1927, New York Amsterdam News article that heralded the establishment of the Schomburg collection. The article quotes Schomburg, who spoke of how proud he was that his collection had become part of the NYPL: “Speaking of the collection, he said it was the fruit of thirty-five years’ work, beginning as a boy in Porto Rico, where he was born, and with no dream that the collection would one day be placed in a library, all being for his own pleasure. The first books collected were those of Negro authors of Spanish descent, he said.”
The article noted that Schomburg had recently been in Seville, Spain, searching for additional documentation on Black people. He found letters between the Catholic pope and other politicians about the naming of Francisco Xavier de Luna y Victoria as the first bishop of Panama. Luna y Victoria was Black, and many opposed his appointment, but the pope stood up for him. Schomburg also spoke of the pride he felt in seeing paintings by Juan de Pareja, who Diego Velázquez enslaved, and by Sebastián Gómez, who was enslaved by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.
“We should be very proud of these two men,” the article quotes Schomburg as saying, “men born slaves, who were so able to grasp the techniques of painting. In an age when no stress was laid on color, just imagine how many works of this sort may be hidden.”