That collection arrived at the 135th Street Public Library 90 years ago. He was a bibliophile who migrated from puerto rico in 1891 found a job on wall street work in the mailroom saves his pennies and worked really hard and bought anywhere are unique but he could find that was by or about black people. He eventually became famous for this collection. People would go to his home in brooklyn to see the library to borrow from the Library People like Langston Hughes and eventually people like and when the librarian at the library and library decided she had a lot of lack patrons coming to the library and a large immigrant community at the time she said ive got to find material for my patrons and ultimately schombergs collection of 5000 items was purchased by Carnegie Corporation and a variety of 90 years ago and made up the core of what now today is a 10 million item collection at the Schomberg Center. Host how did the Schomberg Center end up at 135th . Guest this was the settlement zone kind of ground zero for what came to be the black mecca of the world. That is harlem usa for black folks. Most people today think about harlem in relation to the apollo or abyssinian baptist church. 125th street is the commercial corridor in harlem and the public imagination it turns out that the first africanamericans to really settle in this community settled on 135th street where we are today between lenox avenue and Seventh Avenue better known today as malcolm x boulevard and Adam Clayton Powell junior boulevard. That one block to receive some of the first black families and property owners. Its why the ymca the first ymcas across the street and the harlem hospital which is not for black basement patients in its founding came training black physicians and nurses. This is the institutional and Residential Home for black Harlem Harlem and its beginning. Host what is the Schomburg Centers relationship with harlem . Guest it is the official repository of this community. It is the archive of the place for telling stories, history makers and change agents from Langston Hughes to James Baldwin to maya angelou to harry bonta phthalate this is the place of these people walk through the doors in search of inspiration fellowship and camaraderie and walked out of the store smarter more committed and more passionate to tell the stories to do the work to help change this country. Host Khalil Mohammed what is the schomburg relationship with the new york Public Library . Guest it owns and operates the center is part of a Large Library system. The new york Public Library was the broker of the deal that helps to bring the collection along with Carnegie Corporation and interestingly enough the National Urban leaguer. The library itself is committed to serving patrons of this community by finding this collection and for these past 90 years the new york Public Library is a part of the operations of the center as it does other Research Centers associated with it. Host 10 million pieces objects. Whats in that 10 million . Guest a lot of paper and a lot of folks so we have about or hundred thousand volumes in terms of looks and those books represent our purchases over those 90 years including Arturo Schomburg better known as Arthur Schomburgs original collection. We also have a very substantial manuscript collection which has about 800 unique collections and in those 800 collections everyone from Lorraine Hansberry play writer of brazen in the sun to malcolm x to maya angelou to al bunch. Its those individual pieces of paper correspondence and diary entries the unpublished manuscripts that ad up to those numbers. We have hundreds of thousands of photographic images from negatives to prince to born digital photographic material which of course represents more recent material. We have a collection which represents original jazz albums unpublished material including moving images going back to the 1960s and 70s when a lot of documentaries were made and we have the text of that footage and finally we have actually in our collection which rivals frankly the best Art Collections that exist in this country. We have argued this and no one has taken issue with it that we may have in terms of certainly a Library Museum the best collection of 20th century africanamerican fight arts. So the collection is fast in its range and significant in what it represents for telling both africanAmerican History and global black history. Host available to the public . Guest yes, yes. We are committed in the new york Public Library system to every single item that i have just described in general terms available to any kind of researcher or individual selfdescribed late to expert, young adult to seasoned experienced member of this community can come in and ask to see original material and have that material delivered to them so that they might see, touch, feel and read for themselves. Host are you funded solely by the new york Public Library . Guest no. The Library Receives 60 of its general support romba city of new york and there is a substantial endowment that helps to fund the overall operations of the libraries are roughly speaking we get about 60 of our money from the city of new york visavis the new york Public Library and 40 funded from endowments and other grants that we are all worded in the course of our fundraising. Host and what is your role here next. Guest my role is to set the vision and direction of this institution to manage the leadership of this institution and make sure our patrons who number more than 3000 in terms of body through our doors every year which i might add is three times the number of people who come here and before i arrived. My job is to make sure that this place run smoothly that we are responsive to Community Needs in terms of our programs, our exhibitions so wayfarers funding shortfalls i focus on addressing them both shortterm and longterm. I am made mr. An advocate for the importance of institutions like this that are committed to history that are committed to literacy and committed to education particularly one that expand our public sphere that helps people to feel a part of our democracy to be engaged by it so i carry a lot of water in terms of representing the institution externally. Host how did you get here. [inaudible question] guest i arrived here by way of a traditional search process but i was a history professor at Indiana University for six years. Prior to coming here i taught u. S. History with a specialization in Race Relations and africanAmerican History and the particular circumstances of my rifle coincided with the departure of my predecessor Howard Dobson and his Search Committee that was interested in perhaps doing a reboot generalization generationally so i was able to talk my self into a pretty good gig. Host you have been here five years now. What significant changes would you like to see happen or have happened in those five years . Guest so this is the start of my fifth year and i would say that we have worked very hard to make the Schomburg Center is relevant to younger audiences as it was say in the 60s and 70s and 80s at a time of the Schomburg Center was very much engaged in the lives of young cultural producers and artists and other kinds of activists as i have party names. So we focused a lot on our program, bringing in different talents that would speak to those younger audiences and by that i mean we are talking about people from 25 to 45 years old. As a result of some clever social Media Marketing new talent we have seen again as i mentioned our numbers of people through our doors triple to over 300,000 which is a big deal. We have also increased their educational footprint so the Schomburg Center has a saturday program which is focused on College Preparatory africanamerican studies so broadly speaking we use the collections to work with middle and High School Students to increase their critical reading and oral analytical skills and then we exposed them to ways of communicating and expressing themselves from dance and the spoken word, journalism scholarship so on and so forth so i have focused a lot on taking that program and securing its finances as well as making it a model for other kinds of organizations around the country who are interested in doing more out of school time work for history is important. We have a lot of focus on s. T. E. M. Theres a lot of focus on sports, performance with very little in history and you know for programs such as booktv history is a big part of the nonfiction world and a big part of what we think is lacking in our overall Popular Culture so we want people to be more historical. Host youve been quoted as saying i want to be the google of the start literacy. Guest we want to bridge a millennial sensibility when it comes to technology and see and access of information with substandard and rich engagement so google is the portal to a universe of information and we want to be on the backside of that universe to provide Quality Content and to be a source of inspiration. The last thing we want people to have either in realtime or virtually turning them off to the deep engagement of ideas and scholarship and literature that we are focused on. Host where did you grow up . Guest south side of chicago. Host were Jakarta School . Guest Kenwood School threequarters of mile from where the president and first lady call home. I studied economics and decided late in my tenure there that i was going to be a public accountant. So i made a mad grab for classes so i could take the exam and graduated with a degree in economics and started taking summer courses in accounting and started in philadelphia as a public accountant for deloitte at the time. Host how did you get from delight to a history professor . Guest college is a fascinating journey. The best of college is an opportunity to expose one to various endeavors of humankind. So for me all of the kind of liberal arts that i was exposed to in english and history classes and africanamerican study classes none of which were my major turned out to be the most interesting to me once i got out of college. So i decided if i was going to have to beat as smart as i needed to be as an accountant in the governing accounting vegetables for the professions i could make sure Financial Statements were accurate if i was going to be half have to be that smart in accounting id rather be that smart in history are africanamerican study something that was much more important to me intellectually and something that was abutting passion. Thats why after a couple weeks i said i have to switch careers. I stayed for 22 months but then decided to go to graduate school. Host where did you go . Guest i went to Rutgers University and studied with the pulitzer prizewinning author who i am proud to have been a student. Host and a ph. D. From from rockers as well . Guest ph. D. In American History from rutgers, yes. Host is africanAmerican History of American History . Guest its absolutely American History. There is no america without the black experience being central to understanding how this country essentially came to be the worlds leading superpower. He could tell a story of American History that starts with the indigenous populations of the early world and contest over land but you wouldnt get very far to the founding of the nation for the concept of freedom or the debate over slavery or the economics of the nation without putting black people at the center of that story. Host dr. Mohammed this has that quote and if he could explain further. Something broke between the parents have been the purveyors of that cultural knowledge from the 20s to the 30s to the 40s to the 60s. The parents at some point, my parents generation decided they wanted their kids to go to wall street and they want their kids to be physicians. They wanted their kids to be lawyers. They wanted the kids to assimilate into american institutions in ways that were not compatible with the oldschool approach. They did it with the best of intentions but too to many traded on the opportunities. Guest yeah thats an interesting quote. Thats me. [laughter] host are you surprised by that quote . Guest not really, sounds about right. The black experience has always been one about seeing the whole from the margins. The moment after the 1960s moved the margins conceptually. That shift from the margins particularly for burgeoning black middle class and for people it felt like the work of reconciling the possibilities of the American Dream with the reality that the infrastructure no longer was a barrier to that meant that a significant number of africanamericans lost that sense of skepticism about holding those principles in mind against the reality of the experience so my generation unlike my parents generation were not handed the kind of critical sensibility that had always been part of the journey. Itd been the sharecropper sensibility, had been early civil rights activists understanding that the they have privilege black people had an obligation to make sure the country was living up to its possibilities. My generation experience was one that we were literally thrown into the world as if it was nothing wrong with the world and there were problems with the world. This was a world that for me by the time i was a senior in college was trying to understand why martin king had to come the focus of a major urban uprising and represented the tip of the iceberg for the criminal Justice System that was the looming on an unprecedented scale. None of us could know in 1991 in 1992 that we be talking about mass incarceration today but my parents in particular in terms of generation did not prepare us for the work that needs to happen today and thats the critique that i was making about trading on individual success without a sense of social responsibility. Host who are your parents . Guest my parents are both retired professionals. One was a schoolteacher and administrator in the Chicago Public schools for 35 years and my father recently retired was a photojournalist who work for Johnson Johnson publishing in the early days and for the past 20 years the New York Times staff photographer. Host are they retired in new york . Guest my mother has always lived in chicago. My father parents have been divorced since i was young. Host what is your lineage . Guest my lineage. The famous part of my lineage the part that i know as opposed to distantly design the greatgrandson of Elijah Mohammad the founder of the nation of islam. My father grew up in the nation was educated at the university of islam until he went to college. My mother never converted that very much formative to my early years my First Cousins aunts and uncles were all very much part of their grandfather and fathers legacy. I was very much part of that is a child. Host why was that formative . Guest formative in a way that any child who is part of a family that mean something to people you recognized early on that people see you differently. I had conversations with adults because being the greatgrandson of Elijah Mohammad that other children wouldnt have had out of sheer curiosity and the typical ways and which celebrity culture attaches to these descendents of famous people. I had some sensibilities that were cultivated as a result of coming from a family with this background. Those were all formative. What made the counterintuitive to folks is that i was not taught anything special with regard to the nation of islam and any member of the nation at the time. I was not being groomed to be a successor. In fact my great uncle started a separate movement of sunni islam that while his father were still alive was controversial but he in some ways embodied the family legacy one generation removed. It trickled down to my generation including my First Cousins so the analogy i like you sometimes is the preachers kids are oftentimes the ones raising the most telling church as opposed to being the ones who are following in their fathers or mothers footsteps. Host all that said what is malcolm x his role at the Schomburg Center . Guest he is a major part of our commitment to celebrating the contributions of africanamericans who have articulated in courageous terms the black experience. He is collection is absolutely one of our most significant collections. Its been with us for about 10 years and annually we have programming to commemorate his birth and his assassination. These are usually focused within muslim communities both foreignborn immigrant and american because those communities still look to the legacy of malcolm x that help to understand the world. We had a terrific one this year that a lot of people who met dr. Max in lebanon and cairo and 64 looking at his world perspective at the time. Host the Schomburg Center also sponsors a guest we do this in collaboration with Max Rodriguez who is the founder of the harlem book fair but as a venue for more than 15 years now the Schomburg Center has been the home of the harlem book fair. We are proud of that and we see thousands of people through our doors and it had wonderful programs aired on cspan of new authors. Host Khalil Mohammed in a lot of interviews you have done in writing to have done you talk about education. I want to read another quote. You further explain this. The only way to get a coherent message is that you train everybody based on a common set of readings and understanding of what the problem is so everyone buys into that message. Do you remember saying back . Guest i dont. Im a little bit curious as its probably in a specific context. If im talking about young people its what we do and the Junior Scholars Program so they will read a common text for example. In years past they have read the autobiography of malcolm x. They have read slave narratives. They have read congressman john lewiss graphic novel called march and i think they read march to this year because it just came out. Depending on the context in which the quote was articulated its the same way which Columbia University has a core curriculum in terms of the canon of great works of literature or history from which you build basic knowledge to find your voice in response to this canon. Host if you were to build the core curriculum where would you build a . Guest i wish i could he is fluent in designing curriculum in this context. Im a history booster so i think its critical that people understand that passed in the way the professional historian articulated it. There are all sorts of historical narratives in our popular discourse. Bill orielly for example published his history books. I dont count those in the corporate alum of what im talking about but Edmund Morgan wrote a book called american slavery American Freedom which wrestled with that dilemma and the conundrum that we think is operational or instance, that slavery was aberrational and it was the exception to the american project and as a harvard professor described as period precisely for what many historians would now agree was that slavery was essential to the project of both defining what slavery and freedom more and is well shaping the limits of democracy which are still a work in progress. So that would be one book for example. Dave baldwin is a terrific writer and someone for whom the Schomburg Center has a special connection to and i would make sure it was read at the Schomburg Center. The declaration of independence because no work of literature and the u. S. Context and no work of history is not in conversation with those core ideals articulated by the founding fathers. Peter you are stretching the limits of my Curriculum Development on camera but when we stop there for now. Host that was pretty good for offthecuff. If somebody wanted to come in and read kings personal papers from Maya Angelous personal papers could they come into the Schomburg Center in request back . Guest yes, they could. The definitive of my angelas collection. Dave baldwin we only have correspondence between him and his brother. His collection remains in the possession of the states and one day we hope to get it but even the collection of correspondence between david owen and James Baldwin is really important scholarship. Host dr. Mohammed you were also an author. What looks . Guest my only published book at this time is called the condemnation of lacmas race, crime and the making of modern urban america. Host the second one for quite a while. Guest ive had administrative and fundraising responsibilities of made it difficult to forge ahead. I have done a lot of research and published an article. The second book is called disappearing acts acts the end of white criminality in the age of jim crow. Host are you surprised by the past year in Race Relations . Guest yes, i am. Im surprised those in the way in which there have been callous shootings of unarmed people that seem to come one after the other other. These are not new phenomena obviously but we would think that in a nation that is saturated with media and commentary that we might see Behavioral Changes and that what happened in statin island might have limited the possibility that walter scott was shot in the back in Charleston South Carolina bar might have impacted the circumstances of freddie grays death right in baltimore just a few weeks ago. So im surprised that the highprofile nature of these moments seems not to have had an effect on changing Police Behavior around the country to the point where people are frustrated and more focused on organizing a changing system than i have seen in my lifetime as an adult. Host put it in some historical perspective. Has this been in a typical year . Guest oh yeah. Its been a typical. I think the most significant measure of a technicality is the involvement and investment of the department of justice in responding immediately two episodes of Controversial Police shootings so what starts literally for this moment i would say for the last 12 month period with the ferguson investigation dovetails into a Philadelphia Department of justice investigation and the most recent reporting on the cleveland doj reporting sow dissent decrees have also fallen on new Works Police Department in the last 12 months. We have not seen this kind of department of justice engagement in local policing since the Civil Rights Movement. Host would this have happened do you think, would dig dig doj would have been involved if you didnt have a black attorney general . Guest one could argue that its probably more important that theres a democrat in the white house than a republican given the way that the Republican Party has treated matters of criminal justice until quite recently with the bipartisan efforts in georgia or by the Koch Brothers or rand paul, the senator from kentucky. I do think that eric holder matters more to the commitment and willingness of using doj resources to investigate local Police Matters than the presence of a black man in the white house or president obama in particular. Host notice the book on your desk. Guest this is on my desk and it hasnt been read yet. Host i will ask about the title and why its on your desk. The loneliness of black republican. Host guest written by a new or for faster at the Harvard Kennedy school. She is terrific and i have started it. It is representative of her new field of modern political history that tries to unpack the origins of the new right starting in the 1970s and some other great authors kevin kruse wrote about this period on atlanta. Matthew rossiter wrote about it. This is very recent modern u. S. History and her work looks at the experience of africanamericans who were appointed by republican starting with Richard Nixon or were republican candidates or served in office such as senator edward rec and really asks interesting questions about the Republican Party at that time period, those pioneers Clifford Alexander for example whose daughter Elizabeth Alexander is a terrific poet and wrote a memoir at gale amperage is updated wrote a poem for the president s inaugural. Clifford was an appointee and look at the individuals not to our current focus on the Republican Party but through the lens of their actual politics and their ideology their commitment to making real the promises of the Civil Rights Movement for the africanamerican community. Yes much more probusiness, much more friendly to transactional politics meaning we are going to work with the politicians and we are just in helping black people less doubled into the democratic hardy but they have been approached to civil rights postcivil rights meaning after the movement that makes todays democrats look like the liberal republicans of most of them were. If that makes sense. Host Khalil Muhammad who were some of the contemporary africanamerican writers that you admire . Guest the modern minority myth which is terrific. Farah griffin who is a comparative literature scholar with a book called harlem nocturne experiences in the interwar period. I just read a book about ethel morris who was a pioneering journalist for the chicago defender which was a terrific read. I just read a couple of dissertations. [laughter] so my reading is very broad. Host you have been quoted as saying you want to make smart again. Guest yeah well im in the Smart Business so in any line of work you want your market to expand and grow in relevance and importance. I think that im going to borrow lewis left froms quipped that he wrote in harpers a couple of years ago where he said americans have been amazing propensity for grand simplification and what he meant by that is that americans dont like complexity of the past and they tend to jettison the complexity of the past for simple ways of understanding things. To quote them directly he said the abuses of American History how they engage in the past usually to underwrite wars or to underwrite wall street to quote lewis lafon and in a sense he is calling for us all to be a lot smarter about the world we have inherited in the world that we might want to live in. That requires us to wrestle with complexity to be patient with our learning and in that sense i want i agree with him and i want to make that. I want to make people want to appreciate reading aside to not fission history books which are not merely the bestsellers that account for great fiction writing. Its funny thinking about another book im reading is Tony Morrisons the bluest die. She has a new book out gob bless the child which bless the child would tie bless the child which i have not read yet but im going back to that because i wanted to hear early Toni Morrison in my head because she has this amazing body of work which i have read most of her works and in this instance we are talking a lot about racial identity in this country for all sorts of reasons including pressures of black migration and immigration to this country the changing nature of who black people are in america and who are increasingly foreign born or or so anyway thats another book that popped into my head. Host is the father of three children are you satisfied with what they are learning about u. S. History . Guest no. My kids go to public school. My son whose curriculum i know best he is now a freshman in high school. My wife is also on the school board in our community so i get to see and hear the concerns of a swap of parents in that community. They do a lot of reading and theres a lot of great literature. My son is reading fahrenheit ordered 51 right now but they dont do as much with the complexity of history as i would like to see as a trained historian. Listen, for a long time i was on the receiving end of what we do in our classrooms and so i knew what freshmen or sophomores are kinds of basic historical knowledge they had whether or not they were there reading good books that i signed in high school or grade school him nevermind the fact that i would they were not wellversed in terms what we call social studies in primary grades as they should be. Im not satisfied. My son does not read enough quality history, does not read enough quality nonfiction that isnt a scholastic distillation of last weeks news. Theres a lot more literature focus which is terrific that there needs to be much more nonfiction history taught and students should be required to read it in school. Host what are some of your favorite exhibits. The Schomburg Center . Guest we did a wonderful show on the Great American collage just who is a contemporary Jacob Lawrence and his work is in museums around the world including the schomburg. That was a favorite show for a fine art show at the schomburg. We also did a gordon park show then looked at the photography of one of americas greatest fine arts and documentary. He got his start working on the new Deal Administration of roosevelt and worked at time magazine. We have also done terrific shows looking at early forms of photography going back to the 18 50s of antebellum africanamericans here in new york and other parts of the country who ticked itself for pitcher for the purposes of telling their own stories and showing that they were people whose humanity should be respected and captured in the best light. We also did a great motown show colon operating with the Motown Museum and brought the original artifacts including marvin gayes whats going on gold records and diana rosss supreme dresses that was all sequenced so those are the highlights of shows we have done here and we have done recently a rare book collection focused on a new acquisition of slavery material from the center for the study of transatlantic slavery that represents the most significant individual gift the Schomburg Center has received a 400 rare book items related to the abolition of slave trade as well as an endowment gift to support fellowships and programs so we have also put on display items from the collection. Host but dont you show us some of the current exhibits. Guest sure look forward to it. Host dr. Mohammad. Host dr. Mohammed where we headed . Guest we are going into the Latimer Addison gallery name for one of the librarians at the schomburg and coned that helped to support the renovations. Host what do we have showing here . Guest this is a documentary that was completed in 1970. It was aired on television of the Selma Movement led by dr. King in 1965. This particular footage represents the number of outtakes because we have the entire footage of the original event in the documentary was of course edited for television so this represents some of the collections that have tremendous Research Value at the Schomburg Center because you are seeing aspects of this movement that may not have been as meaningful in 1970 as they would be now. We wanted to sort of look at the scale of people in church and zero and because obviously dr. King is going to demand most of our attention but what if you are trying to figure out what was the average age of the marchers in the people that were supporting king . We have footage here that in the wide shots to you get to see a lot more people participate. Host 100 years from now is dr. King going to be a footnote is is he going to be a major figure . Guest dr. King will always be a major figure because he will always represent the best of the american tradition which is that the individual has the capacity to literally change the world. That is what the American Dream is built on the core notion of individualism and king embodies that better than anybody except that his individualism was used in the service of the greater good. Dr. King is always going to be with us. Host lets continue our tour. What you want to show us your . Moving image of the courts. Guest the moving image and recorded sound shows an album collection. Whats great about this is think about the 5yearold the first the 5yearold hoop first of all is never seen so these are art of acts in a way that 20 years would have been such a big deal but in the Digital World are a big deal. Secondly the art that is demonstrated here is itself a form of Historical Preservation to see in which the way the cover art speaks to the artists and musicians who created it. We have everything from Richard Wrights black boy by brock. He is the most famous for the star role and to kill a mockingbird. Host is this the entire book . Guest and unabridged version. As you well know you only get 90 minutes on an lp. Additionally ruby dee who grew up literally in the Schomburg Center to pass last year this is an album of her reading the work of famous back black woman and quitting credit king ida b. Wells who was an early antilynching activists signed by ruby dee and ruby dee what is not commonly known learned act thing at the library at this place in the theater repertory called the american theater. Hello Harry Belafonte was there and ozzie days this was there in sydney poitier was there. Host continuing to tour and this is open to the public . Guest this is open to the public. Alex haley telling the back story to roots. This is the famous black intellectual w. E. B. Dubois. The subject of the twovolume pulitzer prizewinning work. The interesting thing with dubois you look at that and you think how fascinating ive never even heard his voice. You could pull out your phone right now and its on itunes so we have the album yes but the world has access to the continent that outcome and that is exciting. Host is that a good thing . Guest that is a good thing. We want people to have access to the store of cultural production of knowledge and information. Libraries are conduits. We both preserve so imagine if we didnt have it. I dont know where itunes got the master copy but imagine 100 years from now theyre going to be something that cant be digitized because they dont exist anymore so we are doing our part to make sure the materials preserved. Host does it lend itself to a dumbing down of history . Guest sure. The fact that we can keyword search and i will give you the classic example. Newspapers are wonderful sources for historical research. David mcauliffe could not write the books that he writes without having access to historical newspapers even from a colonial period. They are rich. They give you characterization of individuals. Its the stuff of making heroes and villains and even our historical narratives. But the bottom line is that the ease with which we can keyword search information strips us of the time that it takes to search for things the oldfashioned way which then produces serendipitously new kinds of information. You always find much more than what you are looking for when you dont keyword search. Host who was Langston Hughes . Guest Langston Hughes is the greatest black poet of all time and one of the worlds greatest poets, here his work read by ossie davis. Langston hughes is also someone feel for 40 years use this library and had an intimate relationship with the librarians at the time, so much so that 25 years after his passing in 1967 he returned to this library in the start of the 1920s and is now permanently interred. His ashes are part of the main floor of the lobby that is named for Langston Hughes. The Schomburg Center. Host whats next . Guest here we are profiling a collection of childrens and young adult literature that is part of the research and reference division. This is an exhibition that first bonded to a concern that Walter Dean Myers articulated in the New York Times back in 2013 where he said that only about 3 of the annual publication of children and adult literature featured 3200 works. Roughly 93 included as its main focus black hair is. He passed as everyone knows recently and we wanted to celebrate not just Walter Dean Myers work but other gannott. Writers including renee watson, im sorry renee watson was here but Jacqueline Woodson who won the National Book award this past year. She and renee watson were here in conversation. Host is the Publishing Industry been responsive to those concerns . I think its too early to tell and i dont keep track of those numbers in the way that myers did because of the way he was invested in that industry but i would say we probably have a lot more. This is true even for children of latino ancestry. Thereve been continue reporting on the fact that in a country that is becoming browner literally by the year where the majority population of younger people in this country are now today black or brown thats already tipped over. We are not still seeing an explosion of literature to reflect their humanity so we have got work to do. Host whats next on our tour . Guest we are moving it to our main exhibition hall and you will see representations of our fine Art Collections as well as our Photography Collection and our manuscript collection. Host have seen her name a couple of times. He was Jean Blackwell hudson . Guest Jean Blackwell hudson was chief of the schomburg before they were called directors from 1948 wait for it, until 1980. Thats a long time. 32 years so she really helped to build this place. She was the third director. They were schomburg and the man named Lawrence Redick who is the First Published biography in 1959. Hit them here 10 years from 1938 to 1948. Host what is the regard of that biography . Since david one on two right the First Published in 1975 or 1976. Host what is David Levering lewis doing today . Guest he is doing a book on wilkie. Wendell willkie. He sees in wilkie a vision of republicanism that defied categorization and had a real commitment to the kind of zivotofsky we have lost in this country. Host what was it like being David Levering lewiss graduate student . Guest it was intense. David is not only brilliant but also very demanding and the standards are very high. I had to get caller i. D. In this first offing. It was brandnew to telephone services. I was picking up the phone and he was on the other and asking for the latest draft of my dissertation. I thought i cant walk into this again. Its nerveracking so i could be better prepared. Host David Levering lewis has been on both tv many times including a prayer and a program. Go to booktv. Org and watch all three hours of that. Why did we stop your . Guest this is what we call the cosmic ram done by an artist named houston conwell and its and amash to Arturo Schomburg for whom the center is named and has found a collection that built the beginnings of this institution and Langston Hughes. Langston hughes ashes are underneath the marble floor here permanently as part of the schomburg collection as a testament to the importance of harlem to him the literary world in which he helped to define and an institution of Cultural Heritage and preservation so we are happy to be here with Langston Hughes and to continue to tell his story to visitors as they come. Host versus is a Langston Hughes auditorium. Booktv will be live again this july. Guest can we see this because this is something i forgot to mention. The Schomburg Center recently won the nations highest honor given by the institute for Library Services and the ceremony took place a few weeks ago at the white house and the first lady presented the National Medal to the Schomburg Center along with nine other museums or libraries from around the country. Of course this happened during our 90th year. It only makes it all the sweeter sweeter. We are very proud of this honor. Host congratulations. Guest thank you. So we are heading up to what they call exhibition hall. It is also part of the original Carnegie Library known as the 135th street library. This library was built by the Architectural Firm in 1905. Its on the National Registry for historical landmarks and we are entering the stage that was the original reading room where schomburg himself worked and where his collection was permanently encased in this room in very ornate kurils that adorn the walls. Eis imagined that the collection was more than books. The Schomburg Library at the time was in cahoots with the Harman Foundation for their commitment to raising the visibility of lack visual artist artist. Host in good cahoots. Guest in good cahoots thats right. Theres no understanding of the Schomburg Library that isnt as expansive as possible. It was always about more than just books. This exhibition celebrates the breadth of the collection and bringing together a Photography Collection, manuscript collection and rare book items as well as their fine Art Collection. Host Khalil Muhammad you have a nice size billing at the corner of 135th and lenox right off the number two line and the number three line but where do you store 10 million items . Guest all over the place. This is a 75,000 squarefoot complex that represents three buildings. All the books that we have ever purchased including schomburgs are still here on site. And manuscript collections however live both onsite and offsite and that is true of the art and artifacts collection as well as the recorded sound. Host you were not telling us where. Guest well some of it is in the source facility in harlem. Some of it is in a shared facility called recap which is a collaboration of the new york Public Library columbia and Princeton University in new jersey. Host what are we looking at here . Guest this is a show inspired by hashtag black lives matter. We call it black life matters. Security is choice show not unlike what we sunday at the gallery. Each curator was asked to focus on as part of their collection that point had not been seen and two would help to contribute as expansive vision of black humanity in a time where we felt the conversation might be too reductive, too much about survival, too much about the sheer need to focus on the criminal Justice System. We know the political work that is necessary is essential but we also want to remind everyone who walks through our doors from tourist to white new yorkers in New Jerseyans to black residents of harlem or the bronx that black people are bigger than some of the tragedies and losses losses, so the show wrestles with all of that, but the good in the back come the complexity. Host did you come up with the name for the theme of the show after this past year . Guest of kosher. The show was inspired by the events particularly that focused on ferguson and statin island when the show was coming into existence. Host what he wants to show us . Guest i want to show you in looking at this case, you see some of the treasures of our manuscript collection. So here we have James Baldwin who is writing a letter to maya angelou and hes complaining about having done a project called a wrap on race. Hes a little bit annoyed that he doesnt think the project is going to be very good 70s sounding off with his good friend maya angelou. Host dear dear sister was marvelous to hear from you. I didnt know how much i needed to hear from a solid funky friend that is the opening line James Baldwin to maya angelou. Guest you have to love that. Theres an image of maya angelou and another person who can ask actually learned from my grandmother who married my grandfather the son of Elijah Mohammad that they rented from Carl Hansberry who owned an apartment building. I didnt learn that until a couple of years ago before my grandmother passed. One of the most famous black playwrights in American History her papers are here. She was a, thats right and has very much been the focus of a kind of renewed interest in her work partly because a lesbian. Also Lorraine Hansberry tells the story of moving to a predominantly White Community so there are echoes this to resume. Host what is the significance . Why did it become a cultural touchstone and assents . Guest because it was timely and brilliantly executed and it positioned a black family as multitextured intergenerational also traditional. It brought you inside of a Nuclear Black family in the way that was passed college i toured caricatured and much of American Literature and certainly in pop culture but also didnt shy away from the difficulties of that gambling in dealing with the challenges of the stigma of inequality antifreeze in general. Host continuing the tour. Guest sure, so this is an interesting story a really great story actually. Currently as i mentioned to you part of the breadth of the collection includes an amazing fine Art Collection and represents the canon of black visual artists. Just about a year and a half ago the gentleman from the bronx reached out to the curator and said i want to give the Schomburg A Jacob and she said we will check it out. This is definitely worth more than 125. [laughter] schomburg is one of the most famous photographers of the late 20th century but particularly she is known for the u. S. Information agency that was part of the cold war apparatus. [laughter] with the post colonial nations. So this is the benign side of the cia he was a photographer down in nigeria and 1970. He has in the expansive body of work and we have the entire collection. So they have lesser known images across the continent starting from pittsburgh to nigeria. With Elijah Muhammed that are rarely seen. Showed a photo down here. And there is not the mexico now, ex. There is a shot in washington with date figure with the narrative of christianity. There must have been quite a debate it is taking place on a global scale. It is not polite i will show you one other fascinating image from malcolm x as part of the collection. Your he is at the Natural Museum of history and your essentially she is using the image of the african woman to talk about black people in a context to of a group of young muslim girls. This is of a History Lesson were in one of the reading rooms of the schomburg and we have little treasures of this private collection and were honored to have this work. Candid camera get in here . It is an old book. It is 200 years older than our country. It was published first in latin 1573 a man of african descent that was enslaved and emancipated that is the scholar of grammar this is one of the prize is positions one of the original collections that came to the Schomburg Center. Host you are handling this without gloves. Yes. Were not as, what is the word . Particular we care deeply but part of it is the materials are in the service of learning and as much as me take great pride and condition no one will do damage by picking it up to turn pages. Can anyone see the book . If they happen to agree to let in all the better. Richard wright it is his first major novel. Is a pleasure and on the map in a big way because he was a wrestling with the deep issues of poverty and in this case the First Edition is to the schomburg collection it is more special to have that manuscript and hear the manuscript pages are crossed out with punctuation or different words this is exactly what they need to understand the vision of the book to understand the difference between the final block and the process. Day you have Richard Wrights entire collection . We do not. Where might the other records be held . I do not know. Host continuing licking and rare manuscripts. We know one of the most celebrated womens writer of africanamerican writer is my angelou her first runaway bestseller, this is the actual menu script with the title there in the pencil inside quotation marks. This is her handwriting. This is her state police and here she lays out the actual manuscript to chill that transformed his story. With that of recent explosion of slavery studies that has appeared at the last couple of years and more particularly with 12 years as wav it is the solomon story and here is the copyright page that i am turning published in 1853. This was made into a movie a couple years ago. For the Schomburg Center was part of an early effort by him and his successors in a time when the ex slave narrative or the writings were not appreciated or not valued so one shoe got past the Abolitionist Movement there was very little value in the book world sufferer to capitalize is on this kind of work and was very much lower middleclass bleeding to cultural preservation. If we wanted without a camera crew were credentials to look to her collection could we see this . Thats right. That is what we are built to do. This region rimming is in the service of anyone and credentials to was to access the material to make documentary films. In day are entitled. And to keep a close eye on them . I asked the curators and the libertarians to make sure that people properly handle the material when it is out for use. In some ways it is the heart and soul of the library. People, every day to access the books with those that are manuscripts or rare books, but these are but have been published, they are in libraries but when you think of one this is with the hightech microfilm readers and their Research Reference area. Is is also the Neighborhood Library that we may pull from the collection this of leverage that is up against the building that is much bigger in terms of the bigger place to get a new book or just to hang out to read. So people come here . It is weird to visit the library. Twitter people coming in to look for today . Variety of things. Sometimes theyre interested in that malcolm x papers. We have a variety of of request. With the demand of the world so is the newspaper for the organization. This is the place that to be committed for the african diaspora. It could be tough to remember the Research Questions that they have. This is the book collection that has always focused on the intersection of cultures so this is the collection of haitian art at the same time people using 21st century tools and research. One other special thing i should show you. This is the caption for a body of work done by one of the most important 20thcentury artist douglas presenting murals to Arthur Schomburg in the work completed in 1934. It is all parts of wpa . With his storytelling so with that work around as the way to depict black people was already crucial to culture coming out of parliament and 1920s. But douglas depiction of black people to tell the history through his art became associated with the harlem renaissance. That it is aspects of vague negro life. We can see it . Yes these are the closest things to the schomburg per minute exhibition. They pretty much stay on the wall. We got a tour now were on the corner it is not
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