Arturo Alfonso Schomburg Quotes (1874-1938)

“With such crucial truths to document and establish, an ounce of fact is worth a pound of controversy”

“José Martí always stated that the republic would have been impossible without the brawn and muscle of all races.”

“What of it if the darker races are getting consciousness, isn't the world large enough for the people of all bloods to dwell therein?”

“The works of José Julián Acosta and Salvador Brau have been my first inspiration to a further and intense study of the Negro in America.”

“The Negro has been throughout the centuries of controversy an active collaborator, and often a pioneer, in the struggle for his own freedom and advancement.”

“Vindicating evidences of individual achievement have as a matter of fact been gathered and treasured for over a century: Abbé Gregoire's liberal-minded book on Negro notables in 1808 was the pioneer effort”

“By virtue of their being regarded as something "exceptional," even by friends and well-wishers, Negroes of attainment and genius have been unfairly disassociated from the group and group credit lost accordingly.”

“Already the Negro sees himself against a reclaimed background, in a perspective that will give pride and self-respect ample scope, and make history yield for him the same values that the treasured past of any people affords.”

“Almost keeping pace with the work of scholarship has been the effort to popularize the results, and to place before Negro youth in the schools the true story of race vicissitude, struggle and accomplishment. So that quite largely now the ambition of Negro youth can be nourished on its own milk.”

“There is a sad and tragic chapter in the history of Cuba under Spanish rule, that seems to circle with pathetic recollections the dreadful wrongs done to innocent men....A calm generally precedes these conditions and I will attempt to carry you through the events as they were ushered into existence by the break of day.”

“The modern school with its many books, but without systematic lectures, turns out many graduates who are lacking in retentiveness and no sooner than the sound of the words has left their teachers' lips, the subject been forgotten; and if they are called upon to explain the theme, it is reduced to an incomprehensible mass of meaningless words.”

“Many Cuban Negroes curse the dawn of the Republic. Negroes were welcomed in the time of oppression, in the time of hardship, during the days of revolution, but in the days of peace and of white immigration they are deprived of positions, ostracized and made political outcasts. The Negro has done much for Cuba; Cuba has done nothing for the Negro.”

“In Europe we have had the historian Hume who said in one of his essays that "there are Negro slaves dispersed all over Europe, of whom none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity.... In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly."”

“The African brought to America among his patrimony musical instruments...The African fetiches with their religious dancing has had its counterpart in the Voodoo ceremonies in Haiti and the Nanigoz societies of Cuba, known to exist in those islands as late as 1890. It is quite true that the Church, not knowing the true interpretation of music and dancing carried on by the African has dubbed it with the term savagery.”

“The bigotry of civilization which is the taproot of intellectual prejudice begins far back and must be corrected at its source. Fundamentally it has come about from that depreciation of Africa which has sprung up from ignorance of her true rôle and position in human history and the early development of culture. The Negro has been a man without a history because he has been considered a man without a worthy culture.”

“The blatant Caucasian racialist with his theories and assumptions of race superiority and dominance has in turn bred his Ethiopian counterpart-the rash and rabid amateur who has glibly tried to prove half of the world's geniuses to have been Negroes and to trace the pedigree of nineteenth century Americans from the Queen of Sheba. But fortunately to-day there is on both sides of a really common cause less of the sand of controversy and more of the dust of digging.”

“We have been instructed to look at the Negro as "idle, worthless, indolent and disloyal," but a careful examination of the West Indies and South America does not show this to be true. Many instances of advancement by hard industry can be noted in any of the many spots of the New World. There is not a single field of industrial activity in which the descendants of the African have not contributed their mite toward an improvement of conditions which the gold seekers and pleasure hunters were wont to overlook.”

“Imagine a boy living in the city of his birth and not knowing who was the most noted native painter! It is true the fact was recorded on a marble tablet duly inscribed and placed on the wall of a building where it could easily be read. However, the inhabitants of San Juan knew but little of the man thus honored. The white Spaniards who knew, spoke not of the man's antecedents. A conspiracy of silence had been handed down through many decades and like a veil covered the canvases of this talented Puerto Rican. Today we understand the silence and know the meaning of it all.”

“Though it is orthodox to think of America as the one country where it is unnecessary to have a past, what is a luxury for the nation as a whole becomes a prime social necessity for the Negro. For him, a group tradition must supply compensation for persecution, and pride of race the antidote for prejudice. History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset. So among the rising democratic millions we find the Negro thinking more collectively, more retrospectively than the rest, and apt out of the very pressure of the present to become the most enthusiastic antiquarian of them all.”

“The remark attributed to John C. Calhoun,' "that the Negro race was so inferior it could not produce a single individual who could conjugate a Greek verb," was accepted half a century ago in this country as the last word on the subject of the inferiority of the Negro. Thomas Jefferson, one of the fathers of the revolution, and a friend of the Negro race, who was not so dogmatic as Calhoun, said: "I think one (Negro) could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid: and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous.... Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never saw even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. ... Religion indeed, has produced a Phyllis Wheatley, but it could not produce a poet." So much for the American statesmen.”

“After this great era of public interest and discussion, it was Alexander Crummell, who, with the reaction already setting in, first organized Negro brains defensively through the founding of the American Negro Academy in 1897 at Washington. A New York boy whose zeal for education had suffered a rude shock when refused admission to the Episcopal Seminary by Bishop Onderdonk, he had been befriended by John Jay and sent to Cambridge University, England, for his education and ordination. On his return, he was beset with the idea of promoting race scholarship, and the Academy was the final result. It has continued ever since to be one of the bulwarks of our intellectual life, though unfortunately its members have had to spend too much of their energy and effort answering detractors and disproving popular fallacies. Only gradually have the men of this group been able to work toward pure scholarship.”

“We have chairs of almost everything, and believe we lack nothing, but we sadly need a chair of Negro history. The white institutions have their chair of history; it is the history of their people, and whenever the Negro is mentioned in the text-books it dwindles down to a footnote. The white scholar's mind and heart are fired because in the temple of learning he is told how on March 5, 1770, the Americans were able to beat the English; but to find Crispus Attucks it is necessary to go deep into special books. In the orations delivered at Bunker's Hill, Daniel Webster never mentioned the Negroes having done anything, and is silent about Peter Salem. In the account of the battle of Long Island City and around New York under Major-General Nathaniel Greene, no mention is made of the eight hundred Negro soldiers who imperiled their lives in the Revolutionary War. Cases can be shown right and left of such palpable omissions.”

“But even this latter groups who came within the limelight of national and international notice, and thus into open comparison with the best minds of their generation, the public too often regards as a group of inspired illiterates, eloquent echoes of their Abolitionist sponsors. For a true estimate of their ability and scholarship, however, one must go with the antiquarian to the files of the Anglo-African Magazine, where page by page comparisons be made. Their writings show Douglass, McCune Smith, Wells Brown, Delany, Wilmot Blyden and Alexander Crummell to have been as scholarly and versatile as any of the noted publicists with whom they were associated. All of them labored internationally in the cause of their fellows; to Scotland, England, France, Germany and Africa, they carried their brilliant offensive of debate and propaganda, and with this came instance upon instance of signal foreign recognition, from academic, scientific, public and official sources.”

“Reinforcing these were still rarer items of Africana and foreign Negro interest, the volumes of Juan Latino,7 the best Latinist of Spain in the reign of Philip V, incumbent of the chair of Poetry at the University of Granada, and author of Poems printed there in 1573 and a book on the Escorials published 1576; the Latin and Dutch treatises of Jacobus Eliza Capitein, a native of West Coast Africa and graduate of the University of Leyden, Gustavus Vassa's celebrated autobiography that supplied so much of the evidence in 1796 for Granville Sharpe's attack on slavery in the British colonies, Julien Raymond's Paris exposé of the disabilities of the free people of color in the then (1791) French colony of Hayti, and Baron de Vastey's Cry of the Fatherland, the famous polemic by the secretary of Christophe that precipitated the Haytian struggle for independence. The cumulative effect of such evidences of scholarship and moral prowess is too weighty to be dismissed as exceptional.”