The Pioneering Historian Behind the Schomburg Center, Arturo Schomburg, Was a Brother of Kappa Alpha Psi

Did you know that Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, the visionary collector and historian whose life’s work became the foundation of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, was a member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc.? Schomburg was initiated through the fraternity’s Omicron Chapter in 1922.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg was born on January 24, 1874, in Santurce, Puerto Rico, the son of a freeborn Black woman from St. Croix and a merchant of German descent. As a schoolboy, he was told by a teacher that Black people had no history, no heroes, and no accomplishments worth remembering. Rather than accept it, the young Schomburg made a vow that would shape the rest of his life: he would find the proof and let the record speak for itself.

At seventeen, Schomburg moved to New York City, settling first in Harlem and later Brooklyn. He threw himself into the movements for Cuban and Puerto Rican independence, then turned his energy fully toward documenting the global history of people of African descent. He co-founded the Negro Society for Historical Research and served as president of the American Negro Academy, all while working a day job in the mailroom of a New York bank and pouring his own modest income into his search for books, manuscripts, and art.

Over the years, Schomburg amassed one of the world’s great personal collections of Black history, more than 10,000 books, slave narratives, letters, prints, and artifacts, including poems by Phillis Wheatley and correspondence from Toussaint L’Ouverture. In his landmark 1925 essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” he argued that “History must restore what slavery took away,” a rallying cry for the Harlem Renaissance and the study of Black history.

In 1926, the New York Public Library purchased Schomburg’s collection with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation and housed it at its branch in Harlem. Schomburg later became the curator of his own collection. He died on June 10, 1938, but his legacy only grew, as the branch was renamed the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, today one of the world’s foremost archives of the African diaspora. His lifetime of scholarship reflects the Kappa Alpha Psi motto, “Achievement in Every Field of Human Endeavor.”