The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Turns 100

The Harlem Renaissance icon and national landmark, known worldwide as one of the most impactful institutions preserving and providing access to Black history and culture, marks its legacy with an exhibition spotlighting gems from its 11-million-item collection, a commemorative library card, book giveaways, and Centennial Festival.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture will kick off its 100th anniversary on May 8th, 2025, with a year-long celebration that includes a major exhibition, a summer festival, book giveaways, lively new programming, and a limited edition library card. Exactly one hundred years ago on May 8, 1925, its forerunner—the Division of Negro Literature, History, and Prints at the 135th Street Branch Library—opened its doors at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. 

The exhibition 100: A Century of Collections, Community, and Creativity is one of the largest in the Center’s history, and will include feature iconic objects from its holdings including, Aaron Douglas’s murals “Aspects of Negro Life” and Pietro Calvi’s sculpture “Ira Aldridge as Othello,” manuscript pages from Maya Angelou and Malcolm X,  the visitor book from the 1925 opening (signed by Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and artist Augusta Savage) and collection items that exemplify the Schomburg’s legacy of librarianship from Romare Bearden, James Baldwin, James Van Der Zee and more. The exhibition is curated by Director Joy Bivins and Schomburg staff, with an audio guide narrated by actor, producer, author, and literacy champion LeVar Burton and Schomburg curators. 

The exhibition’s opening will be an all-day celebration with fireside chats featuring former directors Howard Dodson, Kevin Young, and Khalil Gibran Muhammad with current director Joy Bivins, prolific writer and editor of Narrative Projects at New York Times Veronica Chambers, curator of the groundbreaking exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism Denise Murell, PhD, and Pulitzer Prize winning author of The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Dr. Jeffrey Stewart and an evening reception DJ’d by Stormin Norman. 

Starting on the same day, patrons can take home their own piece of Black history with a special-edition library card depicting the Center’s cosmogram Rivers. The card will be available at all NYPL branches while supplies last. Branches will also give away copies of the children’s book Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library, a picture book detailing Arturo Schomburg’s vision to create the archive that would found the Schomburg collection.

On June 14th, The Schomburg Center continues celebrations and begins a robust new programming season with a Centennial Festival combining the Center’s two largest annual events—the Black Comic Book Festival and the Schomburg Literary Festival—into an all-day, public gathering of authors, booksellers, artists, readers and fans in celebration of Black literature and imagination. The festival will feature readings, panel discussions, workshops, children’s storytimes, cosplay, a vendor marketplace, and a mobile library. Featured authors include Imani Perry, Damon Young, Alejandro Heredia, Mahogany Browne, Glory Edim, Katie Mitchell, Tricia Hersey, and more. The day will close out with musical performances by Slick Rick and Soapbox Presents during an old-school block party.

This programming season will also feature “Tasting the Schomburg Collections,” intimate family-style dinners, prepared using recipes inspired by Arturo Schomburg’s unfinished cookbook and with recipes adapted from the menu collection and other early 20th-century cookbooks available in the Schomburg Center’s collections. The first dinner will be hosted by chef and owner of Harlem’s own Red Rooster, Marcus Samuelsson.

More programs will be announced throughout the year. New events and initiatives, including a booklist focused on the Centennial year, a new Schomburg curriculum, and more will be announced regularly on nypl.org/schomburg100.

“The Schomburg Center’s 100th anniversary is a moment for great celebration and deep reflection. We move into our next century fully understanding that this work is as urgent today as it was a century ago,” said Joy Bivins, director of the Schomburg Center. “As we celebrate this one-of-a-kind institution and what those before us created, we are eager to continue this legacy, doing the important work of preserving, stewarding, and sharing Black history and culture with our community, here in Harlem and around the world, for another century.”

“We are proud to celebrate 100 years of the Schomburg Center, a truly extraordinary institution that has been inspiring the world since its beginnings as a gathering place for the community during the Harlem Renaissance,” said Anthony W. Marx, President of the New York Public Library. “Today, that legacy lives on in the Schomburg Center’s world-class exhibitions, events and programs – all free, open to everyone, and living proof of the power of Arturo Schomburg’s singular vision. The New York Public Library is honored to continue this work and committed to ensuring that Black history and culture remain accessible and celebrated, today and for the next 100 years.”

“When my great grandfather, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, set out to prove the global accomplishments of Black people, I wonder if he ever imagined that 100 years later, the world would still be honoring his work, and the legacy of diasporic excellence,” said Aysha E. Schomburg, NYPL Trustee and President and Chief Executive Officer of The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. “The Schomburg Center is an extraordinary inheritance, of which we are all beneficiaries. As we celebrate this centennial year and all that this special bequest brings to bear, let’s salute the past, stand guard over the present, and sow the seeds for the next 100 years.”

EXHIBITION

The centennial exhibition, 100: A Century of Collections, Community, and Creativity, tells the story of the Schomburg Center through objects, people, and the place–Harlem–that have shaped it. Featuring more than one hundred objects from its vast collections, 100 will occupy all three of the Schomburg Center’s galleries and provide visitors a peek into its diverse collections and a snapshot of its rich history across time. 

Visitors can expect to see and learn about:

• A visitor register log (1925-1940) featuring the signatures of notable Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Augusta Savage
• Handwritten manuscript pages from the papers of James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and Lorraine Hansberry
• Ossie Davis’s copy of the Purlie Victorious script
• Works by photographers James Van Der Zee, Gordon Parks, Dawoud Bey, Carrie Mae Weems, and Koral Carballo
• The work of artists Romare Bearden, Augusta Savage, Albert Alexander Smith, Faith Ringgold, and Elizabeth Catlett
• Materials from the Fab 5 Freddy collection, documenting hip-hop’s earliest days.
• First editions with personalized inscriptions and manuscripts from some of the most significant artists of the Harlem Renaissance.
• Spotlights on trailblazers, including Catherine Latimer, Lawrence Reddick, and Jean Blackwell Hutson, who began their careers at the 135th Street Library
• Selections from Arturo Schomburg’s personal holdings, known as the seed library, purchased in 1926

The exhibition will run through Winter 2026.

SPECIAL EDITION LIBRARY CARD AND BOOK GIVEAWAYS

A limited edition Schomburg Centennial library card will be available in all NYPL branches starting May 8th. The card features an image of the Schomburg Center’s beloved art installation, Rivers by Houston Conwill.

Rivers by Houston Conwill, with Estella Conwill Majozo and Joseph De Pace, is a public art installation located in the Schomburg Center’s lobby in honor of poet Langston Hughes. This work is a brass cosmogram inspired by Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and African ritual ground markings. Langston Hughes’s cremated remains are interred beneath the center. 

This spring, NYPL branches will give away 5,000 copies of the children’s picture book, Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library by Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrated by Eric Velasquez. A select booklist focused on the Schomburg Center, the Harlem Renaissance, and key figures of the Center’s history will be on display at branches and online for further reading and programming. More information on the book giveaway will be available at schomburg.org/100.

CENTENNIAL PROGRAMMING

In addition to the Centennial Festival in June and the Tasting the Schomburg Collections series, other programming includes: 

• But Then I Read Lorde in collaboration with Alexis Pauline Gumbs (October 2025)
• The Inaugural Jean Blackwell Hutson Lecture and Award Ceremony
• Explorations of Black theatre and film with the series A Century of Black Theater Reading
  • Big Plays in the Library Little Theater
  • Black On Screen: A Century Of Radical Visual Culture
• Registration and details to come can be found at schomburg.org/100.

To support the anniversary celebrations and the Schomburg Center’s future, a consortium of funders have made leadership gifts, including Andreas Dracopoulos, the Mellon Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF). Mellon Foundation’s generous support of the Home to Harlem Initiative will culminate in the closing Centennial exhibition. The third phase of this multi-year project will activate Arturo Schomburg’s visionary seed collection and pay homage to a century of making collections accessible for personal research and communal learning.

“The Schomburg Center preserves for everyone the Black history and culture that are core to the DNA of New York and of our culture at large. But as a pillar of a library system that plays an integral role in the life of the city, the Center goes far beyond preservation, sharing contemporary cultural insights, nurturing curiosity and learning, and creating universal experiences that bridge the distance between past and present—as exemplified by the program for the Centennial Festival,” said Andreas Dracopoulos, Co-President of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF). “Thank you to the Schomburg Center and NYPL for keeping the beacon of knowledge burning; may it shine as brightly for the next hundred years.”

SCHOMBURG CENTER ORIGINS

What we now know as the Schomburg Center started as The New York Public Library’s 135th Street Branch in the zenith of the Harlem Renaissance. The boom of Black artistic and literary culture in Harlem inspired the trailblazing team of librarians—including Ernestine Rose and Catherine Latimer (the first Black librarian in the NYPL system)— to address the neighborhood’s needs for Black books.

The Negro Division of History, Literature and Prints, founded in 1925, was bolstered by the purchase of the collection of Arturo Schomburg the following year. His personal holdings reflected a lifelong mission to collect evidence of Black achievement after being told as a child that there were none. During the past century, the Schomburg Center has grown from thousands of items to a stunning 11-million-item collection. Today, it houses the papers of Maya Angelou, Sonny Rollins, and James Baldwin, as well as an expansive and unique collection of material on Black life and culture across the globe. Black history is both collected and made at the Schomburg Center, with patrons using its collections to explore Black identity and create new knowledge, literature, music, film, and art. 

About the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Founded in 1925 and named a National Historic Landmark in 2017, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is one of the world’s leading cultural institutions devoted to the preservation, research, interpretation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diasporan, and African experiences. As a research division of The New York Public Library, the Schomburg Center features diverse programming and collections totaling over 11 million items that illuminate the richness of global Black history, arts, and culture. Learn more at schomburgcenter.org.

About The New York Public Library

For over 125 years, the New York Public Library has been a free provider of education and information for the people of New York and beyond. With over 90 locations—including research and branch libraries—throughout the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island, the Library offers free materials, computer access, classes, exhibitions, programming, and more to everyone from toddlers to scholars. The New York Public Library receives millions of visits through its doors annually and millions more around the globe who use its resources at www.nypl.org. To offer this wide array of free programming, The New York Public Library relies on both public and private funding. Learn more about how to support the Library at nypl.org/support.