Alison Stewart: If you're in Harlem this afternoon, you can help celebrate the birthday of the man for whom the New York Public Library Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is named. Historian activist and bibliophile, Arturo Schomburg was born January 24th, 1874. Now the Schomburg is world-renowned and holds 11 million resources representing the myriad Black experiences in Harlem, the US, and abroad. Now the origin of that collection came from about 10,000 items from Arturo Schomburg's life's work.

Today, until 5:00 PM at the 135th Street branch, there is a popup exhibition in his honor with a selection of items from the original collection. We wanted to know more about the man, so we invited to the show Dr. Vanessa Valdés, who was director of City College's Black Studies program and is now Interim Dean at Macaulay Honors College. She is the author of the book, Diasporic Blackness: the Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Welcome, Vanessa.

Dr. Vanessa Valdés: Thank you. It's such a pleasure to speak with you.

Alison Stewart: Arturo Schomburg was not born in New York City, but in Puerto Rico. He's Afro-Latino with a German last name. Tell us about what his family was like.

Dr. Vanessa Valdés: It's an amazing thing because he encapsulates a lot of ways a Caribbean experience that people don't think about. Arturo Schomburg is born in San Mateo de Cangrejos, which is today San Santurce, Puerto Rico. That is the only space on the island that was founded by slaves that had self-emancipated from neighboring islands. Maroon slaves make up that space. His mother's family is from St. Thomas and St. Croix, today, part of the US Virgin Islands.

His father is part of a family that had been in Puerto Rico for at least 50 years, the Schomburgs. They are a Puerto Rican family. It is just that when we think about Spanish-speaking areas and we think about immigration, we don't necessarily think of Germany. That is where he is from.

Alison Stewart: How did his lineage affect his life in Puerto Rico? His sense of self? How did he identify?

Dr. Vanessa Valdés: That's a fantastic question. He was visibly of African descent. It's the reason that on the cover of my book, I put his picture up and people see his pictures. We know very little about how his parents interacted. We don't know the circumstances of his birth. We do know that his maternal grandmother is named on his baptism certificate, which is held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

We know that he comes to New York at 17 years old and he is wrapped up in the Afro-Puerto Rican and Afro-Cuban communities here in New York City. When we think about any sense of privilege, the evidences that we have are few. For example, there's a picture of him as a child, approximately three years old. We know that that's a studio portrait. How could he have access to a studio portrait to get that picture. There's so much left to be done in terms of his actual roots and what that parentage meant.

We know later in life also that he writes about an 18th century Afro-Puerto Rican painter named José Campeche. He talks about if only he knew that the most renowned painter from his town was of African descent. There was the reality of a denial of African history on the island of Puerto Rico, and one of the reasons that he becomes the person that he becomes is because he did not see himself in official Puerto Rican historiography when he was growing up.

Alison Stewart: When Arturo Schomburg comes to New York City, how does he make a living? What does he do?

Dr. Vanessa Valdés: Everything. I don't say that lightly. At 17 years old, he apprentices in a print shop. He's introduced by someone. He comes with a letter of introduction from Puerto Rico. He works as an apprentice to the print shop. He's working in a hotel. He's making ends meet. It's very much in keeping with the profile of how we look at folks today in New York City. When we get our food delivered or anything that it's people trying to make due. He, again, is swept up in the revolutionary fervor of the time, i.e. there were Puerto Ricans and Cubans here in New York City that were working and fighting for the liberation of those islands, the independence of those islands from Spain.

In their off time, there are meetings in their clubs about that. Jose Marti is here in New York City. Most famous name that many people recognize, but lower Manhattan at the time was a center of that kind of planning to fight Spain in terms of independence. Yes, he was just trying to make ends meet. What he could do as a man of color in late 19th century New York.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Dr Vanessa Valdés, author of Diasporic Blackness: the Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Today is Mr Schomburg's birthday. I've read one description of him, and I don't know if it's accurate or not. I would like your take on it. As an autodidact, self-taught. Is that accurate?

Dr. Vanessa Valdés: It is accurate. The only documentation that we have is that he formally went to St. Thomas College which was a secondary school in the island, probably in the island of St. Thomas. When many people think about Arturo Schomburg, they often relate him to the Harlem Renaissance. He is surrounded by W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter Woodson. The renowned doctorate holding academics at the time, and yet this is a man that completed high school education that we know of. Also, part of that Afro-Puerto Rican and Afro-Cuban scene in lower Manhattan where men and women, human beings who were teaching each other. Teaching each other not only history, teaching each other English. Teaching each other just what it means to be an informed citizen in all of these spaces.

We don't have documentation of his participation in that. We do know that that was happening at the time. We also know just by his involvement. His earliest publications were letters to the editor of The New York Times. We know that there was that level of literacy was also one in which not only he, but all of these human beings were deeply invested in.

Alison Stewart: Let's start talking about the collection and the collecting. Initially, how did it begin? What was he seeking out? What was he looking for?

Dr. Vanessa Valdés: The story of him is the apocryphal story, again, because he hasn't written about this, or at least, we don't have that documentation is that he was a child in Puerto Rico, and the children were assigned to write about their heroes. He wanted to write about a hero that looked like him, and apparently, his teacher said, "Your people don't have a history." For those who are very familiar with Hegel and the idea of Africa has no history, that was how he was taught, and that is thought to be the seed of his collecting.

Later on, we also know that when he's in New York in those years, he also becomes a Freemason. He's initiated into the Prince Hall Lodge, here in New York. One of the main impulses of that group, that paternal society, is the recovery of history. He's working as part of his lodge with the Puerto Ricans and the Cubans that are there, they're also collecting, remnants of their histories, as well as they are looking forward to what independence would look like. He's actually collecting in a number of spaces, but more often than not, again, that seed of evidences of history of Black peoples, using the parlance of the time, of Negro peoples around the world, that becomes his driving force.

Alison Stewart: What are some of the things he's collected? For people who have never visited the library.

Dr. Vanessa Valdés: It's very hard not to speak in generalizations and totalities about Arturo Schomburg. One of the reasons that we know about Phillis Wheatley is because Arturo Schomburg had three copies of her works. One of the reasons that we know as much as we know about Haiti, for example, is because he was one of the earliest collectors of documents related to Haiti and the revolution, and was very much centered on Haiti's role in the independence for the entirety of Latin America.

Later on, Jacob Lawrence has a whole series on Toussaint L'Ouverture and he didn't go to Haiti, he went to the Schomburg Center, what would later be the Schomburg Center, what was then the 135th Street branch. Just look at the documents that Arturo Schomburg had collected, there's a whole evidences of books written about Carthage, which is today Tunisia, that were circulated in 16th and 17th century Europe, that were published in Paris and London and the Hague.

When he sells his private collection to the Carnegie Corporation, who then buys it to donate it to the NYPL, those are some of the things that he's already bought, or he also buys in Europe. That gives testimony to an African presence on the European continent, which people don't really know about even today, when we have conversations about Games of Thrones. People are shocked, like where are the people of color?

That is historically accurate. There were peoples of African descent in Europe at the time and yet it doesn't exist in our imaginations. That's really, it's print, it's books, it's musical scores, it's pamphlets. It is anything and everything related not only to African Americans, but also to Afro-Guatemalans, Afro-Brazilians, everybody is found amongst those now 11 million item collection at the Schomburg Center.

Alison Stewart: I want to tease out what you mentioned in 1926. The collection ends up with the library. Would you explain the transaction?

Dr. Vanessa Valdés: At the Schomburg Center, the librarian at the time, Ernestine Rose, was of the fervent belief that a library should represent and educate its surrounding populace. She had first worked at or earlier previously worked on the lower east side serving mostly immigrant Jewish population. She got collections that really spoke to those groups in terms of education, their histories, and things like that.

She is moved up to Harlem and then she makes a decision, and there's committee that makes a decision that there should be a division of Negro print, history, and culture. Arturo Schomburg is already working with the 135th Street branch. Everyone knows about his collection. People would go out to his house in Brooklyn and look at his collection. This was very well known. The story is that his wife at one point looks at him and says, "Okay, we have to do something about this." That's the direct quote, but literally, his work is everything is everywhere.

The decision was made that the foundation would come, assess the collection, pay him. He was paid $10,000, which currently, the equivalence is over a hundred thousand dollars in 1926 terms, but it still was considered lower than the value of that collection. It then got moved. It was specifically for the purpose of donating that to the division of Negro history, print, and literature, and it became the donation. It was an existence prior to those 10,000 items, but that becomes then the bulk of what that division has.

Alison Stewart: It seems like a man who is so dedicated to this wouldn't just give up his collection. Was Arturo Schomburg still involved with it once it got to the library or did he just release it?

Dr. Vanessa Valdés: No, he did not. He's like very much, so 1926 happens, he receives $10,000 and with that money, he actually travels to Europe. There, he goes to Spain and France, and he visits the archives there because he has the project by which he explicitly wants to explore the presence of African peoples and peoples of African descent on that continent and gather all those evidences. Immediately that summer, he sailed from New York to Seville.

That day, lands at the Archivo de Las India, which is the archive of the Indus, which if anyone is involved with colonial Latin American history, that is the archive. He goes there. He goes to all of the cathedrals. He goes to La Giralda, which is the main cathedral in Seville. He gathers those documents and then he goes onto France and he continues gathering. Actively, he continues to buy with the specific purpose of bringing things back to the 135th Street branch.

Alison Stewart: On his birthday, what is his legacy? What's important for people to know about him as someone who has written a whole book about him and clearly is enthusiastic when you talk about Arturo Alfonso Schomburg?

Dr. Vanessa Valdés: He is the physical representation of Sankofa. He is best known for his article of The Negro Digs Up His Past. Just that principle of, "We cannot know where we're moving toward if we don't know our history." That is not a maxim or a dictum that can solely be applied or should only be applied to peoples of African descent, but quite frankly, particularly in this moment in US history. We all need to take that up. I think that is his living legacy, is to really understand, dig into what our history is, and understanding that official histories don't necessarily encompass all of our histories. That it is incumbent upon us to dig up our own histories.

Alison Stewart: My guest has been Dr. Vanessa Valdés, author of Diasporic Blackness: the Life and Times for Arturo Alfonso Schomburg on this day, his birthday. Dr. Valdés, thank you so much for being with us.

Dr. Vanessa Valdés: Thank you. Have a magnificent one.

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