The story begins with Andrew Carnegie's money and Charles Follen McKim's architecture. In 1901, Carnegie agreed to fund 65 branch libraries across New York City, and McKim, of the firm McKim, Mead & White, designed a three-story Italian Renaissance palazzo at 103 West 135th Street. When it opened on July 14, 1905, with 10,000 books on its shelves, it served a neighborhood that would soon undergo a profound demographic and cultural transformation. By the 1920s, Harlem was becoming the capital of Black America, and the 135th Street branch found itself at the epicenter of the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1920, Ernestine Rose became the branch librarian -- a white woman from Bridgehampton, Long Island, who quickly integrated the all-white staff. Catherine Allen Latimer, the first African-American librarian hired by the NYPL, was sent to work with Rose. Together with Sadie Peterson Delaney and others, they wove the library into the fabric of the community, cooperating with schools and social organizations to bring reading into people's daily lives. Rose reported to the American Library Association in 1923 that requests for books by and about Black people were rising sharply. By late 1924, she had convened a meeting with Schomburg, James Weldon Johnson, and Hubert Harrison to focus on preserving rare books and building the African-American collection. The 135th Street branch was becoming something more than a neighborhood library -- it was becoming a cultural institution.

When Schomburg's collection arrived in 1926, it brought immediate acclaim. His purpose in donating was explicit: he wanted to demonstrate that Black people had a rich history and culture, and that claims of inferiority were lies. The Carnegie Foundation, persuaded by Rose and the National Urban League, paid the $10,000 purchase price and donated the collection to the library. By 1930, the center held 18,000 volumes. In 1935, it began delivering books weekly to homebound readers too disabled to visit. The collection was renamed the Schomburg Collection of Negro History and Literature in 1940. When Rose retired in 1942, the library held 40,000 books, and the community specifically requested a Black librarian to replace her -- Dorothy Robinson Homer, who would create the American Negro Theatre in the building's basement.

The transformation from neighborhood branch to world-class research institution unfolded across decades. Jean Blackwell Hutson directed the center from 1948 to 1980, guiding it through designation as one of the NYPL's official research libraries in 1972. A new building opened at 515 Lenox Avenue in 1980, and expansions in 1991 added an auditorium and connected the new center to the original landmark building on 135th Street. Under Howard Dodson's directorship beginning in 1984, the Schomburg gained international recognition. The center's 2000 exhibition, "Lest We Forget: The Triumph Over Slavery," toured the world for more than a decade under UNESCO sponsorship. In 2016, both the original and current buildings were designated a National Historic Landmark.

The collection that started with 5,000 objects now encompasses 11 million. Its five divisions -- Art and Artifacts, General Research and Reference, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books, Moving Image and Recorded Sound, and Photographs and Prints -- hold documents signed by Toussaint Louverture, a rare recording of a speech by Marcus Garvey, the papers of James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and unpublished manuscripts by Langston Hughes. A $22.3 million renovation completed in 2017 added new gallery and research spaces and upgraded the Langston Hughes Auditorium. The center draws 300,000 visitors a year -- researchers, students, tourists, and Harlem residents who walk through the doors of the institution that one man built to refute a teacher's casual dismissal of an entire people's past.