A Research Guide to Black Librarianship at the Schomburg Center: About

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has a wealth of resources across its five research divisions that document Black librarianship. To help provide an overview of these resources, this research guide highlights key collections and works at the Schomburg Center. The guide is organized by division beginning with the Research and Reference Division. Resources in the special collections including Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books, Photographs and Prints,  Art and Artifacts, and Moving Image and Recorded Sound are also highlighted. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, formerly the 135th Street Branch Library, has been the professional home to a number of unsung visionaries in the library profession: Catherine Latimer, the New York Public Library’s (NYPL) first Black librarian; Pura Belpré, the New York Public Library's first Puerto Rican librarian; Sadie Delaney, a trailblazer in bibliotherapy who completed her training as a librarian at the 135th Street Branch Library in 1921; Augusta Baker, the first Black woman at the NYPL to receive a permanent position as a children’s librarian in 1937; Regina Andrews, the first Black librarian appointed to lead a NYPL branch in 1938; Dorothy Homer, the first Black librarian to head the 135th Street Branch in 1942; and Jean Blackwell Hutson, who became the head of the Schomburg Collection in 1948 and built it into one of the world’s greatest collections documenting the African diaspora.