Schomburg: The Man Who Built A Library

Arturo Schomburg was born with a sense of wonder. As a boy in Puerto Rico, he shadowed tabaqueros, cigar workers.
These men pooled money to pay an elector to read aloud in the factory: newspapers, novels, speeches, and politics. Arturo took in the scent of cured tobacco and the sound of the reader’s voice. Thus, Arturo not only learned his ABCs but also to love the written word.
So when his fifth-grade teacher told him that Africa’s sons and daughters had no history, no heroes worth noting, did the twinkle leave Arturo’s eyes? Did he slouch his shoulders, hang his head low, and look to the ground rather than to the horizon?
No. His people must have contributed something over the centuries, history that teachers did not teach. Until they did, schoolchildren like Arturo would not learn of their own heritage, ignorance shackling them like chains. After that teacher dismissed his people’s past, did the twinkle leave Arturo’s eyes like a candle blown out in the dark? No, the twinkle never left. It grew into a spark.
Where is our historian to give us our side, Arturo asked, to teach our people our own history?
Afro-Puerto Rican/afroborinqueño, born in 1874, young Arturo Schomburg began a lifelong quest. Still a boy, he took on the mantle of historian. Because he had to know, had to know the truth. In a history club, he noticed that the white youth seemed prouder of their heritage than the black members. Arturo read everything he could about his people. But he did not hurry. He let facts simmer.
True scholarship requires time and calm effort, he figured. Nothing worthwhile is done in haste.
After all, there were ages to traverse.
Lost for hours in books, Arturo was transported by Benjamin Banneker’s almanac to early America.
Arturo studied all he could about this self-taught inventor, astronomer, and draftsman. He beamed as he read that Banneker accurately plotted a solar eclipse. Arturo could almost hear the tick-tock of Banneker’s handcrafted wooden clock – the first built in the New World. Arturo imagined Banneker counting off minutes, racing time to redraft plans from memory for the streets of Washington, D.C. after French architect Pierre L’Enfant walked off and carted his papers with him to Europe. Banneker reproduced them in only two days. The nation’s capital. In two days. By heart. Tick-tock, tick-tock.
Where were the monuments to this genius?