The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center celebrates its beginnings, at a moment when Black history is under attack.
June 12, 2025
Even on an ordinary day, walking into the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem can feel like walking into a shrine.
The ashes of the poet Langston Hughes are buried under the lobby floor, and its reading rooms hold one of the world’s leading collections of material relating to the African diaspora — more than 11 million items.
But on a morning last month, the vibe was more joyful noise than hush. When the doors opened, a group of African drummers led a procession of several hundred people into the lobby, where the Rev. Nafisa Sharriff, an interfaith minister, stood on the mosaic of the cosmos inspired by one of Hughes’s poems to deliver a blessing.
It was 100 years to the day since the Schomburg’s forerunner, the Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints, opened. And it was the kickoff to a year of celebrations, which continue this Saturday with the Schomburg Centennial Festival, a day of literary and cultural events, culminating with an outdoor block party featuring a performance by Slick Rick.
It’s a celebratory moment for the Schomburg, but also a fraught one. In recent months, the Trump administration has slashed federal funding for libraries, museums and humanities scholarship as part of a pivot toward what the president is calling patriotic history. And his broadsides against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — along with more targeted attacks on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture — have left many Black institutions feeling both defiant and deeply uncertain.
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Jennifer Schuessler is a reporter for the Culture section of The Times who covers intellectual life and the world of ideas.
