Background
Arturo Alfonso Schomburg was born on January 24,1874, to Mary Joseph from St. Croix, Virgin Islands, and Carlos Féderico Schomburg, a German-born businessman. Schomburg and his sister were raised in San Juan.
Arturo Alfonso Schomburg was born on January 24,1874, to Mary Joseph from St. Croix, Virgin Islands, and Carlos Féderico Schomburg, a German-born businessman. Schomburg and his sister were raised in San Juan.
He attended the Jesuit-run Escuela de Párvulos but dropped out before completing his studies. His lifelong preoccupation with the heritage of black people began a ta very early age. He experienced racist attitudes in elementary school and in a mostly white literary club, where the common belief among the membership was that black people had no history. Schomburg spent some of his childhood years in the Virgin Islands with his grandparents. During a visit by Puerto Rican independence activist Ramón Emeterio Betances to St. Thomas, young Schomburg became aware of the revolutionary fight for independence occurring in Cuba and Puerto Rico. He left the Virgin Islands with the purpose of continuing his education in New York City, where he arrived in 1891 after a short time in San Juan working in a printing shop.
His 1892 visit to New Orleans was a pivotal moment in his life: his "first significant contact with black Americans". By 1898, with the end of the Spanish-American War and the official disbanding of the Puerto Rican section from the Cuban Revolutionary Party, Schomburg concentrated almost exclusively on the struggle for the liberation of people of color in the United States and across the world.
New York City in the 1890s was a center for Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrant workers and revolutionaries who founded social, cultural, and revolutionary organizations that raised money and published newspapers supporting the independence movement in both islands. Cuban revolutionary icon José Marti and Puerto Rican Emeterio Betances were among the speakers who influenced Schomburg during this time. In New York he attended Manhattan Central High School while holding a series of odd jobs that included elevator operator, bellhop, printer, and porter. He was a militant activist in the Puerto Rican and Cuban liberation movements and in 1892 he became a founding member of a political club Las Dos Antillas (The Two Islands). The club's activities included sending weapons and medical supplies to revolutionary groups in the Caribbean. By the time this group disbanded, his interest had shifted to focus on universal freedom for people of color.
By 1907 Schomburg was twice a widower and a father of five boys. Three sons from his first marriage were being reared in Virginia, and the youngest two in New Jersey. Traveling to visit his sons had further and more realistically revealed the country's system of segregation and oppression of American blacks. Moreover, his involvement in freemasonry with the El Sol de Cuba Lodge No. 38 was also an important factor in his involvement with the black community. He translated documents into English to encourage English-speaking blacks to join the lodge. His work in preserving the lodge's history by organizing their documents and photographs, as well as his rise to important leadership positions over 40 years, led to his election as master in 1911 and grand secretary of the Grand Lodge of the State of New York from 1918 to 1926. His bilingual skills in contacting other Masons in the Caribbean helped him become the first chairman of the lodge's Committee on Foreign Relations. By 1925 he had become a thirty-third-degree Mason.
During the early 1900s Schomburg met fellow Mason and outspoken journalist John Edward Bruce and joined his Men's Sunday Club, an organization that discussed world issues in the context of their relationship to black people. This group had established a library that focused on black history. In 1911 he and Bruce founded the Negro Society for Historical Research, an archival institute that com-piled books and the study of African American history, as well publishing several works on black history. In addition to collecting books and artifacts by and about African people, Schomburg wrote essays promoting the study and research of black themes. In 1913 his essay "Racial Integrity: A Plea for the Establishment of a Chair of Negro History in Our Schools, Colleges, etc." was included in Nancy Cunard's book Negro. He became a documentarian of the accomplishments of blacks and Afro-Latinos such as Haitian liberator Toussaint L'Ouverture and Cuban general Antonio Maceo. In 1914 he was inducted into the American Negro Academy, which supported black history and was against the discriminatory Jim Crow laws and other forms of racism. He traveled widely around the United States searching out publications and materials that dealt with black culture and began to amass a collection of literature about the historical accomplishments of black people. In 1926, after his only trip to Europe, he returned with many contacts and sources that later help him augment his collection to include works from England, France, Spain, and other countries. In 1916 he published A Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry and "Economic Contribution by the Negro to America," published as an occasional paper by the American Negro Academy.
During his lifetime he corresponded and had friendships with a number of prominent individuals such as Henrietta Buckmaster and Langston Hughes. Educator and writer W.E.B. Du Bois edited many of Schomburg's writings. In May 1925 the New York Public Library established the Division of Negro History, Literature and Prints in its 135th Street Branch. Exactly one year later, the library purchased Schomburg's personal collection for $10,000, totaling over 10,000 books, manuscripts, artworks, photographs, and other memorabilia, and added it to this division. From 1932 until his death in 1938, Schomburg served as curator of the collection he had created. Today the center houses over 5 million items and provides international services and programs. A superb Web site makes many or their resources available to the public.
Schomburg became involved in the Harlem Renaissance movement, which spread to other African-American communities in the U.S. The concentration of blacks in Harlem from across the US and Caribbean led to a flowering of arts, intellectual and political movements.
On June 30, 1895, Schomburg married Elizabeth Hatcher of Staunton, Virginia. She had come to New York as part of a wave of migration from the South that would increase in the 20th century and be known as the Great Migration. They had three sons: Maximo Gomez; Arthur Alfonso, Jr. and Kingsley Guarionex Schomburg.
After Elizabeth died in 1900, Schomburg married Elizabeth Morrow Taylor of Williamsburg, a village in Rockingham County, North Carolina. They were married on March 17, 1902, and had two sons: Reginald Stanton and Nathaniel José Schomburg.