Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, was a historian, writer, bibliophile, collector, and activist. He also wrote many books. Schomburg was a Puerto Rican of African and German descent. He moved to the United States in 1891, settling in New York City, where he researched and raised awareness of the contributions that Afro-Latin Americans and African Americans have made to society. He was an important intellectual figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Over the years, he collected literature, art, slave narratives, and other materials of African history, which were purchased to become the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, named in his honor, at the New York Public Library (NYPL) branch in Harlem.
Rose McClendon was a leading African-American Broadway actress of the 1920s. A founder of the Negro People's Theatre, she guided the creation of the Federal Theatre Project's African American theatre units nationwide and briefly co-directed the New York Negro Theater Unit.
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is a research library of the New York Public Library (NYPL) and an archive repository for information on people of African descent worldwide. Located at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard between West 135th and 136th Streets in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, it has, almost from its inception, been an integral part of the Harlem community. It is named for Afro-Puerto Rican scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.
Owen Vincent Dodson was an American poet, novelist, and playwright. He was one of the leading African-American poets of his time, associated with the generation of black poets following the Harlem Renaissance. He received a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation for a series of one-act plays.
The Moorland–Spingarn Research Center (MSRC) in Washington, D.C., is located on the campus of Howard University on the first and ground floors of Founders Library. The MSRC is recognized as one of the world's largest and most comprehensive repositories for the documentation of the history and culture of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and other parts of the world. As one of Howard University's major research facilities, the MSRC collects, preserves, organizes and makes available for research a wide range of resources chronicling the Black experience. Thus, it maintains a tradition of service which dates to the formative years of Howard University, when materials related to Africa and African Americans were first acquired.
Jesse Edward Moorland was an American minister, community executive, civic leader and book collector.
Arthur Barnette Spingarn was an American leader in the fight for civil rights for African Americans.
The American Negro Theatre (ANT) was co-founded on June 5, 1940 by playwright Abram Hill and actor Frederick O'Neal. Determined to build a "people's theatre", they were inspired by the Federal Theatre Project's Negro Unit in Harlem and by W. E. B. Du Bois' "four fundamental principles" of Black drama: that it should be by, about, for, and near African Americans.
Dennis Louis Serrette was an American activist for civil rights and labor rights. He also was the New Alliance Party candidate for United States President in the 1984 presidential election.
Dorothy Louise Porter Wesley was a librarian, bibliographer and curator, who built the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University into a world-class research collection. She was the first African American to receive a library science degree from Columbia University. Porter published numerous bibliographies on African American history. When she realized that the Dewey Decimal System had only two classification numbers for African Americans, one for slavery and one for colonization, she created a new classification system that ordered books by genre and author.
Opera Noire of New York is a performing arts company, as well as a resource and network for African-American artists. ONNY is an organization which has performed in multiple venues in the New York City metropolitan area. Opera Noire was founded by leading New York City Opera tenor Robert Mack, baritone Kenneth Overton and tenor Barron Coleman. The group consists of all African American opera singers.
Murat Brierre or Murat Briere (1938–1988) was one of Haiti's principal metal sculptors and was known for his recycling of surplus oil drum lids. He was influenced by George Liautaud, but his work acquired its own highly experimental style, often focusing on multi-faceted and conjoined figures, fantastically personified elements, and unborn babies visible within larger creatures.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad is an American academic. He is the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Radcliffe Institute. He is the former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a Harlem-based branch of the New York Public Library system, a research facility dedicated to the history of the African diaspora. Prior to joining the Schomburg Center in 2010, Muhammad was an associate professor of history at Indiana University Bloomington.
Jean Blackwell Hutson was an American librarian, archivist, writer, curator, educator, and later chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The Schomburg Center dedicated their Research and Reference Division in honor of Hutson.
Maritcha Remond Lyons was an American educator, civic leader, suffragist, and public speaker in New York City and Brooklyn, New York. She taught in public schools in Brooklyn for 48 years, and was the second black woman to serve in their system as an assistant principal. In 1892, Lyons cofounded the Women's Loyal Union of New York and Brooklyn, one of the first women's rights and racial justice organizations in the United States. One of the accomplishments of the Women's Loyal Union was to help to fund the printing of an important antilynching pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All Its Phases by Ida B. Wells.
Ernestine Rose was a librarian at the New York Public Library responsible for the purchase and incorporation of the Arthur A. Schomburg collection.
The Negro Society for Historical Research (NSHR) was an organization founded by John Edward Bruce and Arthur Alfonso Schomburg in 1911.
Clifford L. Muse, Jr. is an African American historian and archivist. He is currently Howard University's archivist and associate director at the Moorland–Spingarn Research Center. He is most well known for his involvement in the diversity issues of the archive profession as well as his research and writings on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frederick Douglass.
John Louis Wilson Jr. was an American architect. He was one of the first African American architects to be registered in New York State. He had worked for New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and also maintained a private architecture practice in the New York City.
The history of libraries for African Americans in the United States includes the earliest segregated libraries for African Americans that were school libraries. The fastest library growth happened in urban cities such as Atlanta while rural towns, particularly in the American South, were slower to add Black libraries. Andrew Carnegie and the Works Progress Administration helped establish libraries for African Americans, including at historically Black college and university campuses. Many public and private libraries were segregated until after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling of Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
