Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, a Puerto Rican-born historian who worked as a bank clerk in New York, spent decades collecting books, manuscripts and art documenting the history of people of African descent, to refute claims that Black people had no history. In 1926 the New York Public Library bought his collection with Carnegie Corporation funds and later made him its curator. It is now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.