Steven Fullwood: While I'm getting ready -- I wonder if my
computer -- I want to say thank you, Dr. Heywood, for your very energetic presentation today.
[laughter]
The second thing I'd like to say is I'm not Zulu.
[laughter]
I'm not sure what's -- it's stuck here?
Male Speaker: Yeah, yeah, just reboot [spelled phonetically].
Steven Fullwood: Oh, I mean, no, it's not where it -- actually
working.
And the third thing I would like to say is -- I'm not sure what's going on with my computer.
Let's see.
One second.
I am the assistant curator for the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division.
I was hired in July, July 1st, as a matter of fact, and I've been with the Schomburg
for 15 years.
And what I love about hearing these presentations about the National Archives and the Library
of Congress is that the Schomburg center, for me, is a repository -- a genealogical
repository for black people, period.
It is the collection that gave forth -- gave promise to the actual institution that we
know today.
And hopefully, you'll be able to see it shortly.
Ah, thank you.
So finding yourself here in this place.
African-American diasporic genealogical research at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture, New York Public Library.
The focus of my presentation -- I want to give you an introduction to the Schomburg
Center's resources, talk a little bit about the genealogical resources within the Center,
how we use interpretive programming context to interpret these materials, and to name
other institutions in the area and some of the resources that they have, so that when
you come to New York City, you make the most of your research.
The Schomburg Center.
The 135th Street Library was established in 1905.
At that time, Harlem was primarily a Jewish neighborhood.
Given the great -- first great migration of black folks coming from the South, along with
the budding political-cultural activity that we now know as the Harlem Renaissance, the
neighborhood obviously changed.
When I moved to Harlem in 2000, my landlord told me I moved into the same apartment where
the first black person who moved into that apartment in 1924 -- yeah, 1924.
So it was kind of interesting; I was like, "Okay, I'm supposed to be here."
[laughs]
In 1924, Ernestine Rose, one of the librarians, solicited the help of a number of notable
black people such as Arthur Schomburg, James Weldon Johnson, Hubert Harrison, and John
Nail, to help her with the underfunded library that she was actually running.
There were acquisition issues, preservation issues, and she was trying to build their
collections.
A year later, the Division of Negro Literature and History, and prints of the 135th Street
Branch Library was established.
And the first major collection, the collection that we are speaking about today, was produced
-- was sold by Arthur Schomburg, who was a black Puerto Rican-born scholar and bibliophile.
He came to the States, and there're two stories about why he became so obsessed with collecting
black materials.
The first -- I think they're both apocryphal, because I believe that Schomburg was a little
slippery.
A nice guy, don't get me wrong, but I also think he was given to inventing his past.
The Negro did flip his past.
And so the first story is that he was in school in the fifth grade, and they had -- and his
fellow pupils had an Italian Club, a German Club, and so forth, but there was no African
Club.
And the second story is that he was told that there's no such thing as black history.
So, for me, Arthur Schomburg is the -- sort of a very interesting figure in terms of deciding
that he was going to dig up his past, to collect black materials from Africa, from the Caribbean,
from the U.S., and the Americas.
In 1926, his collection was purchased for $10,000, which, if you ask me, was really,
really cheap: 5,000 books, 3,000 manuscripts, 2,000 etchings and paintings, and several
thousand pamphlets, forming the core of the Schomburg's Centers collections today.
He was hired as curator in 1932 and served until his death in 1938.
Two years later, he was named as the -- the collection was renamed in his honor.
And in 1972, the Schomburg Collection was designated as one of the research libraries
of the New York Public Library.
About six years later, the divisions were established.
And this was two divisions along format to ensure the lifelong preservation of these
materials: the Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division; Art and Artifacts
Division; the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division; the Moving Image and Recorded
Sound Division; and the Photographs and Prints Division.
Formerly known as the General Section, the Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference
Collection collects mass-produced materials such as books, serials such as newspapers,
newsletters, periodicals, and microforms.
Geographically, we cover the Americas, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Our languages, of course, include English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, and over
200 indigenous African languages and Creole languages and dialects.
Like the Library of Congress, we have a number of databases, about 84 specifically dealing
with African-Americans of our hundreds, and I wanted to bring that up very quickly.
And these articles and databases range from historical newspapers to census records, of
course, and a lot of those databases are available, obviously, in the library.
But you can also, through your library subscription, access some of those at home, depending upon
the subscription materials.
There's a picture of Jean Blackwell Hutson with the Crown Prince of Harlem, Langston
Hughes.
And these are some of the genealogical resources: we have federal and state census records beginning
in the late 18th century for a variety of states; newspapers and magazines and journals,
as I mentioned; 150,000 volumes and 85,000 microforms; 6,000 serials, including 400 black
newspapers, some of which are available through our databases; and 1,000 current periodicals
from around the world, from the U.S., Caribbean, and Africa; we have biographical dictionaries
such as "Who's Who" and "Colored America"; a number of family histories -- people have
actually come to the Schomburg Center to conduct research on their families, who then gave
a copy of those family histories to us; databases, as I mentioned earlier; and books.
So what I want to bring to the fore here is that context means everything.
So we have histories of black cities, neighborhoods, and business centers.
And you can go from different divisions researching materials, giving context to the work that
you're doing genealogically.
The Art and Artifacts Division.
It's a fine and applied art and material culture objects are collected from the 17th century
to the present, with an emphasis on the visual arts of the 20th century in the United States
and Africa.
It is a representative collection; we do not collect everything from everyone.
What we're trying to do is -- what we're trying to do encompasses four areas: traditional
African art; painting and sculpture; works on papers, including drawings, prints, illustrations,
posters, and reproductions; and textiles and artifacts.
To your left, there is a photograph of Aaron Douglas, who is showing his -- one of his
famous murals, "Aspects of Negro Life: Song of the Towers."
It took me a minute to sort of think about the ways in which genealogical research could
be conducted within this particular division, and the assistant curator, Tammy Lawson [spelled
phonetically], gave me a wonderful story about a man and -- an artist named Earl Richardson.
His sister, who was born, maybe, I think, the seventh of the children at the very last.
Earl Richardson died in 1935.
In 1934, he created the painting you see, "Employment of Negroes in Agriculture," oil
on canvas, 1934.
She came to the Schomburg Center to learn a little bit more about her brother's work,
and, as a result, she also brought us more accurate information about his birth and death
records through a funeral record.
And this is one of the stories where people kind of think about art forms that were being
created around the times in which their relatives lived.
The Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division encompasses a variety of formats including
motion picture film, release prints, and outtakes, video recordings, and music and spoken arts
recordings in several different formats.
The collection strengths are really wonderful: African-American, Caribbean, and African popular
and traditional music genres, a growing collection of nationwide public affairs television broadcasts
such as "Like It Is," Caribbean and African contemporary popular music collections, early
jazz and tap dance film footage, and they're also responsible for managing the Center's
oral history and video documentation program, which records the life story and viewpoints
of the person representing a wide range of disciplines and experiences for the historical
record.
Another genealogical resource, again, we have music and film from every era created by and
about people of African descent.
We also have a number of video histories that I mentioned earlier.
Some of the groups that they focus on are jazz musicians, Harlem hospital doctors, choreographers,
civil rights activists, and filmmakers.
To your left, you see William Greaves [spelled phonetically], documentary filmmaker.
Probably one of the most popular divisions that we have, the Photographs and Prints Division,
because there's so many different types of photographs and images that they contain.
Over a million images from mid-19th century graphics to contemporary documentary art and
film photography.
Photographers represented in the collection include Bert Andrews, Walker Evans, Chester
Higgins Junior, Gordon Parks, Coreen Simpson, Doris Ulmann, James Van Der Zee, and Carl
Van Vechten.
The collection's strengths, which are, again, represented throughout Schomburg's collections
and divisions, include slavery, Civil War, 19th century Caribbean and South America,
modern civil rights movements, performing and visual arts, organizations fraternal,
social, and political, religion/military Harlem, such as street scenes, churches, housing,
and businesses, and images of migrant and rural farm workers and families, sports figures,
and performing arts.
We have a database called "The Images of African-Americans from the 19th Century."
That's very useful, broken down by various subjects, including cultural expression, religion,
slavery, social life and customs -- let's go down here.
There's a lovely group of African-Americans singing and playing their instruments.
And I can't seem to make that any bigger, but -- produced in the -- you see the images
here, and the data information.
And this is often used for a number of reasons, but a lot of these photographs are in public
domain.
The Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, the division that I currently run,
contains a number of holdings, including personal papers, records for individual and organizational
records, subject or thematic collections, literary and scholarly typescripts, play scripts,
broad size, programs and playbills, ephemeral and rare books.
Our subject emphasis over the years, even though we have over 200 subjects -- 250 subjects,
excuse me -- include performing in the visual arts, women in the United States, Haitian
history, African-American religion, social, culture, and political history of Harlem,
20th century writers from the United States and the Caribbean, education in Africa and
the United States, civil rights organizations and activities, and researcher files for scholars
and intellectuals.
To your left, you will see just an image from our Mandela: A Celebration.
It was a special exhibition to commemorate Mandela's birthday, July 18, 2013.
Typically, we have these really large exhibitions, and so to fill in some of those spaces, we're
interested in doing smaller pop-up exhibitions for the time, you know, to commemorate specific
things.
Rare books for us -- our rare books holdings date from the late 16th through the 20th century.
And although the bulk of the titles are pre -- the bulk of the titles are 1865 imprints.
Languages, again: English, French, Spanish, Dutch, German, and Latin.
And subject coverage includes anti-slavery issues in the U.S. and the Caribbean, travel
narratives in Africa and the Americas, biography, slavery in the Americas, history, literature,
and religion.
We have a number of digitized books that appear in some of our online exhibitions, including
Emotion and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, as well as the African-American Women's Writers
of the 19th Century, over 41 full-length books representing several genres such as autobiographies,
poetry, novels, compilation of freedom narratives.
I just want to say, I'll stop here for a second.
Can we say enslaved people?
Can we say enslaved Africans, rather than slaves?
Can we do that?
Can we -- we can do that?
Because I think that's a little more accurate.
[laughs]
[applause]
So I don't say "slave narratives," I say "freedom narratives."
They're not -- they are talking about slavery, but they're actually talking about freedom,
you know.
And so I'll just stop there.
Some of our -- the genealogical resources in our division include church and cemetery
records, insurance registers, orphanages records, slavery manumission documents, plantation
records, benevolent associations; and individual and organizational collections.
At -- I'm going a little quickly here, but these are some of the materials that we have
in our division.
What might distinguish between myself and the National Archives and the Library of Congress
is we do interpretative programming around our collections.
So we do genealogical workshops quarterly.
We partner with the New York chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical
Society to help people learn how to do research at the Schomburg, but also in other institutions.
We have a number of book talks and presentations where artists, writers, and folks coming in
to talk about their research methodologies, which help lay people to kind of rethink,
or to think about how to go about researching our family histories.
Exhibitions, of course, talks with curators about acquisitions, preservation, and access
issues related to collections.
Film festival and screenings.
We often have open houses every October, along with Archives Week, which is sponsored by
the Archivist Roundtable, which is a weeklong celebration in New York City where all the
archival institutions or archival collections come together to celebrate through open houses,
screenings, and so forth.
So it brings the public in to kind of give a sense of what we do as archivist.
I often tell people when they're coming to New York City to look at the other institutions
in the area.
Of course, the New York Public Library; there is a local genealogy department there.
New York Historical Society has a number of records that deal with slavery, abolition.
There's a New York African Free School Records, which was a school to teach newly-freed Africans
how to, I guess, live, if they don't know how to live already.
And local colleges and universities, such as Columbia University, and as Ahmed mentioned
earlier, the records of the antebellum, southern plantations from the revolution through the
Civil War, are available there as well.
Current and upcoming exhibitions now through July 4th, I have copies of our programming
schedule here, and they're also available outside.
I'd love to give you those.
"Schomburg Collects WPA Artists: 1935-1943."
"Breaking the Barriers: American Tennis Association and Black Tennis Pioneers."
Oddly enough, it stops in 1975.
This was an exhibition that came to us, so it doesn't include Venus and Serena.
"Claiming Citizenship: African-Americans in the New Deal Photography."
And at September 23rd, "A Light House in New York" commemorates the 80th anniversary of
Antigua and the Barbuda Progressive Society.
Thank you very much.
If you have any questions about our resources, I'll be glad to help.
[applause]
Bill Pretzer: Thank you, Steven.
I'm sorry there isn't time for questions at this stage.
However, look closely, you know what they look like.
You can find them.
And despite the fact that I have a very long manuscript myself to deliver, I noted on the
program that the next thing is lunch.
And one thing I know is never get between a crowd and lunch.
And, therefore, I'd like you to join me in thanking our three panelists, and I hope the
rest of the day is as educational.
[applause]
I have been informed by the conference organizers that we will start promptly, the next session,
in 60 minutes.
So, rather than 12:30, as noted on your program, we will start at 12:42.
[laughter]
Thank you very much.
Have a good day.