Connecting collections
Photos courtesy of The New York Public Library and Laura Helton September 19, 2024
UD professor’s work on the country’s premier collection of Black history is helping expand access
Laura Helton has spent decades studying the papers of Arturo Schomburg, a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance and early 20th-century bibliophile who seeded two of America’s premier collections of Black history. The assistant professor of English and history is one of a handful of scholars in the world who has thoroughly reviewed Schomburg’s papers. Yet, in 2018 while researching in the Fisk University Library, Helton encountered a document she’d never seen before.
“I opened this file and it immediately took my breath away. It was exactly what scholars and curators had long been searching for: a list of the books and other materials collected by Schomburg from the year 1914. His library was famous, but its origins were somewhat mysterious. There was never a full account of what he had collected, so coming across this document was like finding a missing piece of a puzzle,” she said.
Helton works to provide similar moments of discovery to students and the public through her role as a scholar-editor on “Recreating the World of Arturo Schomburg.” The ‘Schomburg Project’ is a partnership between Fisk University and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to digitally unite each institution's archive of Schomburg papers, allowing broad access to the public and scholars.
It’s a Herculean task, as the collections contain thousands of items, many of them handwritten and difficult to read. Still, Helton explains that understanding archives is often key to understanding literature, history and culture. In this case, it is fundamental to understanding how Schomburg’s collection was created and organized and what he believed was important to preserve.
At a time when schools across the country are removing African American curricula, the project takes on greater impact.
“Traditionally, the field of historical editing has dedicated its energies to preserving the writings and correspondence of ‘founding fathers’ like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. But it’s imperative that we broaden the field, and there are a number of exciting projects underway that are building access to understudied archives, including in African American and African diasporic history,” Helton explained.
Schomburg’s World
After Arturo Schomburg immigrated to New York City from Puerto Rico in 1891, he co-founded the Negro Society for Historical Research; established a collective of like-minded authors and community leaders intent on preserving Black American stories; and began amassing his personal collection of books, images, manuscripts and ephemera.
Schomburg sold his collection of 4,600 books, pamphlets and other print material to the New York Public Library in 1926, and today, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture houses more than 11 million items relating to Black Americans and the African diaspora. In recent years, curators have been trying to identify all of the original materials that Schomburg had collected. When Helton shared the document she had found at Fisk, it helped to jumpstart that effort.
In 1930, Fisk hired him to spend a year in Nashville curating the university’s growing collection, making Schomburg responsible for seeding two of the country’s most significant archives on Black American history and the African diaspora.
Human Hours
The Schomburg Project team is currently working to launch the first phase, “Black Bibliophiles in Nashville and Harlem,” a mini edition focusing on the period between 1925 and 1931 when Schomburg was working on both collections.
“Our team is building a system to connect the collections and tell the stories of the way Black intellectual history travels the circuit between Harlem and Nashville,” Helton said. “For both institutions, there’s an importance to telling this story to a new generation of scholars and students.”
Helton expects the full project to last ten years, largely because of the human hours required to conduct the work. Digitizing documents is a simple process, but as computers can’t decipher early 20th-century handwriting, actual people must take the time to transcribe documents.
Helton and her co-editor, Melanie Chambliss, an assistant professor of history at the University of Rochester, will also write scholarly introductions to frame Schomburg’s story and explain the connection between Harlem and HBCUs in the South.
“It’s a story that hasn’t fully been told about Schomburg yet,” Helton said.
The UD Connection | Collectivity
In her recent book on Schomburg and other Black collectors, Scattered and Fugitive Things, Helton writes that through building his collections, Schomburg also built collectivity, “the social practice of ‘becoming-together,’ of finding the contours of a shared commitment.”
“Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg” is a shared commitment between the Schomburg Center and Fisk University, the first partnership of its kind between the two institutions, with UD playing a vital role in supporting the project.
“There’s an ethics to doing work in African-American studies,” Helton said. “A traditional approach to a grant project like this would be to headquarter it at an R1 institution, but we wanted to center the work around HBCUs and students and scholars of color.”
The project provides UD students with opportunities to build collectivity themselves, working alongside the scholar-editors, Schomburg Center staff and students from Fisk, a collaboration that Helton described as “remaking the intellectual circuit” between New York and Nashville.
“I learned about the importance of preserving Black stories and archival materials through this opportunity,” said Monet Lewis-Timmons, the graduate assistant on the project in 2023-2024.
Lewis-Timmons received her Ph.D. in English from UD this spring and is currently a Public Humanities Fellow at Duke University, organizing public discussions at HBCUs and Black museums, drawing on what she learned on the Schomburg Project.
“The experience allowed me to teach and mentor beyond classroom spaces. Working on the Schomburg Project especially helped in creating workflows, coordinating travel and delegating tasks.”
Jamilah A. Watson, a fourth-year sociology graduate student, began working on the Schomburg Project in June and is excited to bring an interdisciplinary approach to the project.
“You learn about socialists like W. E. B. Dubois,” she said, “but now I’m learning about his collaboration with Schomburg, and it gives more context.”
Watson also says that gaining experience in archival management is helping her think about how to access and use archives in her research topics: Black women in roller derby and Black women’s health. “I want to use this skill to dig into the history and understand what’s currently going on.”
As Helton explained, “History is never fully in the past. It’s always very much part of our present.”
Students in Helton’s classes at UD also experience her passion for understanding history. She regularly takes students to Special Collections in Morris Library to see materials like the Langston Hughes ephemera collection, which documents the travels of the famous Harlem Renaissance poet and playwright. In the archives, students explore the events behind his works and ask questions about the context of where and why something was written.
“Literature is not just words on a page. It involves more than an author sitting alone in their room. There is a dynamic literary culture that goes into making any text,” she said.
About the Schomburg Project
“Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg” began with a $120,000 National Historical Publications & Record Commission (NHPRC)-Mellon Planning Grant for Collaborative Digital Editions in African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American History and Ethnic Studies. NHPRC grants support projects that promote access to America’s historical records to encourage understanding of the country’s democracy, history and culture.
This spring, the Schomburg Project received additional funding from an American Council of Learned Societies Digital Justice Seed Grant, which provides resources for projects that diversify the digital domain, advance justice and equity in digital scholarly practice, and contribute to public understanding of racial and social justice issues.
The Schomburg Project team includes co-directors DeLisa Minor Harris, director of the Fisk University John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library; and Barrye Brown, curator of Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books at the Schomburg Center; as well as scholar-editor Melanie Chambliss, assistant professor of history at the University of Rochester.
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