Arturo Alfonso Schomburg - The Negro Society For Historical Research

The Negro Society For Historical Research

In 1911, Schomburg co-founded with John Edward Bruce the Negro Society for Historical Research, to create an institute to support scholarly efforts. For the first time it brought together African, West Indian and Afro-American scholars. Schomburg was later to become the President of the American Negro Academy, founded in Washington, DC in 1874, which championed black history and literature.

This was a period of founding of societies to encourage scholarship in African American history. In 1915, Dr. Carter G. Woodson co-founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now called the Association for the Study of African American Life and History) and began publishing the Journal of Negro History.

Schomburg became involved in the Harlem Renaissance movement, which spread to other African-American communities in the U.S. The concentration of blacks in Harlem from across the US and Caribbean led to a flowering of arts, intellectual and political movements. He was the co-editor of the 1912 edition of Daniel Alexander Payne Murray's Encyclopedia of the Colored Race.

In 1916 he published what was the first notable bibliography of African-American poetry, A Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry.

In March 1925 Schomburg published his essay "The Negro Digs Up His Past" in an issue of the Survey Graphic devoted to the intellectual life of Harlem. It had widespread distribution and influence. The autodidact historian John Henrik Clarke told of being so inspired by the essay that at age seventeen he left home in Columbus, Georgia to seek out Mr. Schomburg to further his studies in African history. Alain Locke included the essay in his edited collection The New Negro.