NYPL’s Schomburg Center Celebrates Centennial

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library will kick off its yearlong 100th anniversary celebration on May 8, with programming that includes an exhibition, a summer festival, book giveaways, and a limited edition library card.

Titled 100: A Century of Collections, Community, and Creativity, the exhibition is one of the largest in the Center’s history, and will draw on Arturo Schomburg’s founding collection and “key” archival items, per a press release. Featured objects will include manuscript pages from Maya Angelou and Malcolm X, the visitor book from the 1925 opening signed by writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, and collection items that “exemplify the Schomburg’s legacy of librarianship from Romare Bearden, James Baldwin, James Van Der Zee, and more.”

On June 14, the Schomburg Center will continue celebrations with its “robust new programming season,” beginning with a Centennial Festival that combines 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, and readers.

During the centennial celebrations, NYPL patrons will also be able to receive a special-edition library card depicting the Center’s cosmogram Rivers. These cards will be available at all NYPL branches while supplies last. In addition to this, branches will 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.

To learn more about the Schomburg Centennial, click here.