1. “People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.” —Giovanni’s Room by James BaldwinJoin the Schomburg’s BGLA for a great discussion of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room on November 27 at 6:30 p.m. Free! Register here!

    “People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.” —Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

    Join the Schomburg’s BGLA for a great discussion of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room on November 27 at 6:30 p.m.

    Free! Register here!

  2. J. Edgar: From Garvey to Gaye

    By: Christopher Moore, Curator and Special Projects Coordinator, Schomburg Center 

    J. Edgar, directed by Clint Eastwood, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, opens nationwide on November 9, 2011.  How will director Eastwood represent Hoover’s obsession with African-American leaders: from Garvey to Gaye?

    From Marcus Garvey to Marvin Gaye, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s investigations of African-American culture, leadership and politics were relentless, profound, and in some cases potentially deadly. As a young U.S. Justice Department agent in 1919, Hoover took early and successful aim at Marcus Garvey’s ambitions. Hoover won Garvey’s conviction, deportation, and for himself in 1924, the top job in the new Bureau of Investigation, later named the FBI.

    Hoover targets that followed included an astonishing list of African Americans, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Joe Louis, Marian Anderson, Josephine Baker, Richard Wright, Elijah Muhammad, Canada Lee, Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, Ella Fitzgerald, Dorothy Dandridge, Malcolm X, Lorraine Hansberry, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, James Baldwin, James Brown, Fred Hampton, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown and Marvin Gaye.            

    Hoover was the director of the FBI until his death in 1972.

  3. This photo is vintage Harlem Renaissance. James Baldwin called Lenox Avenue simply “The Avenue.” In the 1920s neighborhood notables included Marcus Garvey, Madame C.J. Walker, James Weldon Johnson, James Vanderzee, Thomas “Fats” Waller and Pig Foot Mary. Plus institutions like Harlem Hospital, Lincoln Theatre, Savoy Ballroom, Cotton Club and the old YMCA. In ’21, the library hired Catherine Latimer as its first African American librarian. Donors, including John E. Bruce and Arturo “Arthur” Schomburg, began making gifts and loaning materials to the library to help educate neighborhood students and adults. The library and its lectures, displays and public programs became a centerpiece of the Harlem Renaissance. In ‘25 it became the 135th Street Branch, Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints.”—Christopher Moore, Curator and Special Projects Coordinator, Schomburg Center. To learn more about the Harlem Renaissance and the Center, join Christopher Moore on a guided tour on October 5, 2011. 

    This photo is vintage Harlem Renaissance. James Baldwin called Lenox Avenue simply “The Avenue.” In the 1920s neighborhood notables included Marcus Garvey, Madame C.J. Walker, James Weldon Johnson, James Vanderzee, Thomas “Fats” Waller and Pig Foot Mary. Plus institutions like Harlem Hospital, Lincoln Theatre, Savoy Ballroom, Cotton Club and the old YMCA.

    In ’21, the library hired Catherine Latimer as its first African American librarian. Donors, including John E. Bruce and Arturo “Arthur” Schomburg, began making gifts and loaning materials to the library to help educate neighborhood students and adults. The library and its lectures, displays and public programs became a centerpiece of the Harlem Renaissance. In ‘25 it became the 135th Street Branch, Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints.”—Christopher Moore, Curator and Special Projects Coordinator, Schomburg Center.

    To learn more about the Harlem Renaissance and the Center, join Christopher Moore on a guided tour on October 5, 2011. 

  4. My Schomburg Experience (Redefined)

    Steven G. Fullwood, archivist, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, shares another one of his favorite items from the Schomburg collection:

    Letter from Joseph Beam to Sasha Alyson, March 28, 1984 (Joseph Beam Papers).

    “Beam was the editor of In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, the first collection of its kind containing essays, poems, interviews and short stories by black gay men. Beam wrote a letter to Alyson, publisher of Alyson Publications, to inquire about the possibility of publishing ‘a book of collected writings by Black gay men.’ In 1979, Beam worked at Giovanni’s Room, a gay bookstore in Philadelphia who knew about the scarcity of writings by black gay men. He knew of writers such as James Baldwin and Samuel Delany, and periodicals produced by Blackheart, a black gay writers’ collective, but little else. I read In the Life as a 20-year old in Ohio and had no idea that one day I’d discover the letter that essentially started it all.”

    Join Steven on a guided tour of the Romare Bearden exhibition at the Schomburg on October 5, 2011. For more information, please click here.

  5. Happy Birthday James Baldwin. Fast forward the video to 26:01 to watch Dr. Maya Angelou talk about her dear friend, James Baldwin.