When tasked with associating New York with the advancement of African-Americans, many consider the Harlem Renaissance, with its dynamic art, poetry, and music, or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), with its inspirational legacy of civil rights advocacy. Both are associations that are well-founded. However, there is also a less glamorous, albeit important, feat of the age: record keeping. Record keeping was a very important component to the overall advancement of African-Americans. Through record keeping, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg ensured that black people would know their history of achievement for many generations to come and fought for equality in representation. Thus, he is a New York figure that extensively…show more content… After being told by a teacher that “black people had no history, no heroes, no great moments,” he developed a passion for collecting books, letters, art, music and other writings from the African diaspora in order to shed light on the accomplishments of people of African descent. This included more than three-thousand compositions, five-thousand books, two-thousand portraits and etchings, and a few thousand leaflets with relics such as signed compositions of Phillis Wheatley's verse, a few almanacs from Benjamin Banneker, letters of Toussaint L'Ouverture, and more. He amassed over ten-thousand items that served to be a useful resource for the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and NAACP activists. In 1926, the Harlem branch of the New York public library purchased his collection. Schomburg served as the collection curator until his death in 1938. This exhibit has evolved into the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and focuses explicitly on the history, culture and achievements of people of African descent. In January of 2017, it was declared a national
