Early Years
Schomburg was born in the town of Santurce, Puerto Rico (now part of San Juan) to María Josefa, a freeborn black midwife from St. Croix, and Carlos Féderico Schomburg, a merchant of German heritage.
While Schomburg was in grade school, one of his teachers claimed that blacks had no history, heroes or accomplishments. Inspired to prove the teacher wrong, Schomburg determined that he would find and document the accomplishments of Africans on their own continent and in the diaspora, including Afro-Latinos, such as Jose Campeche, and later Afro-Americans. Schomburg was educated at San Juan's Instituto Popular, where he learned commercial printing. At St. Thomas College in the Danish-ruled Virgin Islands, he studied Negro Literature.
Read more about this topic: Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
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