Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City Read Online Free PDF

and scattershot efforts—newspapers that were short-lived, annual commemorations that were eventually abandoned, planned memorials that never came to fruition. It would be left to members of the next generation—those born in the postwar nineteenth century and endowed with greater financial resources, levels of formal education, cultural sophistication, and broader social networks—to begin the work of preserving, institutionalizing, and committing to print the collective memories of early black New Yorkers.
    Take James Weldon Johnson, for example. Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1871, Johnson spent many childhood summers visiting family in Brooklyn. Educated at Atlanta University, he lived in the southern United States and Central America for several years before moving permanently to New York. Once there, Johnson quickly advanced to the forefront of black political activism as a high-ranking official with the NAACP and contributor to the
New York Age.
A prolific writer, in the early 1930s he published a memoir,
Along This Way
, and the seminal history
Black Manhattan.
    In the book’s preface, Johnson insisted that his ambitions were limited. He was not attempting to compile “in any strict sense a history” but simply to “etch in the background of the Negro in latter-day New York, to give a cut-back in projecting a picture of Negro Harlem.” Yet fully one-third of
Black Manhattan
concentrates on early black life in the city, before the emergence of Harlem as a neighborhood and a cultural movement. I wonder whether Johnson’s turning back to the distant past might not have been impelled by his own failure to learn anything about his father’s family. “Here I am again confronted with my lack of foresight,” Johnson lamented in his memoir; “I know nothing of my father’s early life and of his background, aside from the meager facts just stated. I never heard him speak of his childhood and what lay back of it and beyond it; and I never questioned him.” 9
    Despite his humble disclaimers, Johnson was in fact something of a historian. At the end of his preface he thanked all those who had helped him, eyewitnesses, research assistants, and last but not least he added: “I wish also to acknowledge my indebtedness for source material to THE ARTHUR A. SCHOMBURG COLLECTION.” Johnson was referring to the energetic bibliophile who had devoted his life to establishing a library and archive of black history and culture. Born in 1874, Schomburg came to New York from Puerto Rico in 1891. He quickly integrated himself in the city’s black community, meeting Johnson in 1905. Some six years later, Schomburg helped establish the Negro Society for Historical Research. Like Pintard a century earlier, the society’s founders resorted to the word “useful” to describe their mission. They were “to collect useful historical data relating to the Negro race, books written by or about Negroes, rare pictures of prominent men and women, … letters of noted Negroes or of white men friendly to the Negro, African curios of native manufacture, etc., etc.” This material would be useful, indeed indispensable, to writing the history of the black race and teaching it to black people. Within a year, Schomburg had amassed some three hundred books and documents, and with Johnson’s help compiled a
Bibliographical Checklist of American Negro Poetry.
When the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library decided to create a separate space to house its material on black history and culture, theyenlisted Schomburg and Johnson’s help. Soon thereafter, Schomburg agreed to add his library to this initial effort. In 1927, the Schomburg Collection was born. It contained approximately three thousand books, eleven hundred pamphlets, and many prints and manuscripts. 10
    Like Johnson, I too must acknowledge my debt to Arthur Schomburg. After mining the Schomburg archives, I came to two conclusions: first, that I could actually find