The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture's digital collections include manuscripts, maps, photographs, recorded conversations, digital exhibitions, and more.
 
Over 1,000 collections reside in NYPL's Digital Collections and over 300 recorded programs are located on the Center’s Livestream channel.

Can't decide which collections or talks to explore first?

Cheryl Beredo, curator of the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, and Digital Archivist Zakiya Collier share their picks.

BROADSIDES COLLECTION

Overview: The Broadsides Collection is an ever-growing collection of ephemera that dates from the 19th and 20th centuries. This selection highlights broadsides relating to slavery and the abolitionist movement in the United States.

Why: “Printed single sheets, broadsides have been created for centuries, with all variety of purposes—to inform, educate, amuse, provoke, and more,” Beredo said. “Because they were created to be widely distributed, posted, and ultimately discarded (think of the posters plastered on today's streetlamps and scaffolding, the postcards handed to you while standing at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change), they offer a window into everyday life from another time that have been preserved for over a century.”
 

THE NEW NEGRO: AN INTERPRETATION

Overview: A landmark text in African American history and culture, The New Negro brought together writers and artists whose names are now synonymous with the Harlem Renaissance. Of the time, Locke wrote, "Negro life is not only establishing new contacts and founding new centers, it is finding a new soul." This book brims with the creative energy and sense of possibility of the 1920s. Read the full-text through Hathi Trust.

Why: “The brown Madonna's quiet dignity, Paul Robeson's crooked smile, W.E.B. DuBois's resolute eyes, Elise J. McDougal's look of suffering no fools,” Beredo said. "These illustrations by German artist Winold Reiss represent Black artists and intellectuals in the fullness of their humanity.”

SIDNEY LAPIDUS SLAVERY AND ABOLITION COLLECTION

Overview: With the establishment of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery in 2014, the Schomburg Center became home to a collection of 400 rare items of printed material and was established as one of the world’s premier repositories of slavery material.

Why: “To make sense of the country we live in today, we must reckon with the history of slavery in the United States,” Beredo said. “This selection of nearly one hundred items is a sample of the breadth and depth of the broader collection that includes abolitionist treatises, poetry, literature, and government documents from across Europe and the Americas. With these texts, readers can try to wrap their minds around the logic of institutions committed to the growth and persistence slavery, or the brutality of lived experience for those enslaved, the long struggle towards slavery's abolition, and more.”

COVID-19 WEB ARCHIVE COLLECTION

Overview: Developed in April 2020, this collection centers and documents the African diasporan experiences of COVID-19 including racial disparities in health outcomes and access, the impact on Black-owned businesses, and joyful cultural production. The collection also seeks to document the community impact on New York City through state and local news, and government responses to COVID-19.

Why: “To make sense of the diverse ways that people throughout the African diaspora are experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic,” Collier said. “Limited documentation exists that centers the experiences of Black people in past health crises. With this collection of websites, videos, blogs, news articles, photographs, news articles, restaurant menus, obituaries, journal articles, crowdfunding campaigns, reading lists, and more, viewers get a glimpse of the materials historiographers will use to write the history of pandemic in future.”

To see more online materials from MARB, visit NYPL’s Digital Collections.

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