 While I'm getting ready, I wonder if my computer, I want to say thank you Dr. Haywood for your very energetic presentation today. The second thing I like to say is I'm not Zulu. I'm not sure it's stuck here. No, it's not actually working. And the third thing I'd like to say is I'm not sure what's going on with my computer. Let's see. One second. I am the assistant curator for the Manuscripts Archives and Rare Books division. I was hired in July, July 1st as a matter of fact, and I've been with the Schoenberg for 15 years. And what I love about hearing these presentations by the National Archives and the Library of Congress is that the Schoenberg Center for me is a repository, a genealogical repository for Black people, period. It is the collection that gave promise to the actual institution that we know today, and hopefully you'll be able to see it shortly. So finding yourself here in this place, African-American diasporic genealogical research at the Schoenberg Center for Research in Black Culture near Public Library. The focus of my presentation, I want to give you an introduction to the Schoenberg Center's resources. Talk a little bit about the genealogical resources within the Center, how we use interpretive programming, context, to interpret these materials, and to name other institutions in the area and some of the resources that they have so that when you come to New York City you make the most of your research. The Schoenberg Center. The 135th Street Branch Library was established in 1905. At that time, Harlem was primarily a Jewish neighborhood. Given the great first great migration of Black folks coming from the South along with the budding political cultural activity that we now know as the Harlem Renaissance, the neighborhood obviously changed. When I moved to Harlem in 2000, my landlord told me I moved into the same apartment where the first Black person who moved into that apartment in 1924. Yeah, 1924. So it was kind of interesting. I was like, okay, I'm supposed to be here. In 1924, Ernestine Rose, one of the librarians, solicited the help of a number of notable Black people such as Arthur Schoenberg, James Weldon Johnson, Hubert Harrison, and John Nail to help her with the underfunded library that she was actually running. There were acquisition issues or preservation issues, and she was trying to build their collections. A year later, the Division of Negro Literature and History and Prince of the 135th Street, 135th, 130th, 130th Street Branch Library was established. And the first major collection, the collection that we are speaking about today, was produced, was sold by Arthur Schoenberg, who was a Black Puerto Rican-born scholar and bibliophile. He came to the States, and there are two stories about why he became so obsessed with collecting Black materials. I think they're both apoprical, because I believe that Schoenberg was a little slippery. A nice guy, don't get me wrong, but I also think he was given to inventing his past. The Negro digs up his past. And so the first story is that he was in school in the fifth grade, and his fellow pupils had an Italian club, a German club, and so forth, but there was no African club. And the second story is that he was told that there was no such thing as Black history. So for me, Arthur Schoenberg is the sort of a very interesting figure in terms of deciding that he was going to dig up his past to collect Black materials from Africa, from the Caribbean, from the U.S. and the Americas. In 1926, his collection was purchased for $10,000, which if you ask me, was really, really cheap. 5,000 books, 3,000 manuscripts, 2,000 etchings and paintings, and several thousand pamphlets forming the core of the Schoenberg Center's collections today. He was hired as curator in 1932 and served until his death in 1938. Two years later, he was named as the collection was renamed in his honor. And in 1972, the Schoenberg collection was designated as one of the research libraries of the New Republic Library. About six years later, the divisions were established, and this was two divisions along format to ensure the lifelong preservation of these materials. The Jean Blackwell Hudson Research and Reference Division, Art and Artifacts Division, the Manuscripts Archives and Red Books Division, the Moving Image and Record and Sound Division, and the Photographs and Prints Division. Formally known as the General Section, the Jean Blackwell Hudson Research and Reference Collection collects mass produced materials such as books, serials such as newspapers, newsletters, piraticals and microphones. Geographically, we cover the Americas, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Our languages, of course, include English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, and over 200 indigenous African languages and Creole languages and dialects. Like the Library of Congress, we have a number of databases, about 84 specifically dealing with African Americans of our hundreds, and I wanted to bring that up very quickly. And these articles and databases range from historical newspapers to census records, of course, and a lot of those databases are available, obviously, in the library, but you can also, through your library subscription, access some of those at home, depending upon the subscription materials. There is a picture of Jean Blackwell Hudson with the crown prince of Harlem, Langston Hughes, and these are some of the genealogical resources. We have federal and state census records beginning in the late 18th century for a variety of states. Newspapers and magazines and journals, as I mentioned, 150,000 volumes and 85,000 microphones. 6,000 serials, including 400 black newspapers, some of which are available through our databases, and 1,000 current piraticals from around the world from the U.S., Caribbean, and Africa. We have biographical dictionaries such as Who's Who in Colored America, a number of family histories people have actually come to the Schoenberg Center to conduct research on their families, who then gave a copy of those family histories to us, databases, as I mentioned earlier, and books. So what I want to bring to the fore here is that context means everything. So we have histories of black cities, neighborhoods, and business centers, and you can go from different divisions, researching materials, giving context to the work that you're doing genealogically. The Art and Artifacts Division, it's a fine and applied art and material culture objects are collected from the 17th century to the present with an emphasis on visual arts of the 20th century in the United States and Africa. It is a representative collection. We do not collect everything by everyone. What we are trying to do is what we are trying to do encompasses four areas. Traditional African art, painting and sculpture, works on papers, including drawings, prints, illustrations, posters, and reproductions, and textiles and artifacts. To your left, there is a photograph of Aaron Douglas, who is showing his one of his famous murals, Aspects of Negro Life, Song of the Towers. It took me a minute to sort of think about the ways in which genealogical research could be conducted within this particular division. And the assistant curator, Tammy Lawson, gave me a really wonderful story about an artist named Earl Richardson. His sister, who was born, maybe I think the 7th of the children at the very last, Earl Richardson died in 1935. In 1934, he created the painting you see, Employment of Negroes in Agriculture, oil on canvas, 1934. She came to the Schoenberg Center to learn a little bit more about her brother's work. And as a result, she also brought us more accurate information about his birth and death records through a funeral record. And this is one of the stories where people kind of think about the art forms that were being created around the times in which their relatives lived. The moving image and recorder sound division encompasses a variety of formats, including motion picture film, release prints and outtakes, video recordings and music and spoken arts recordings in several different formats. The collection strengths are really wonderful. African American, Caribbean and African popular and traditional music genres, a growing collection of nationwide public affairs television broadcasts such as like it is. Caribbean and African contemporary popular music collections, early jazz and tap dance film footage. And they're also responsible for managing the Center's oral history and video documentation program, which records the life stories and viewpoints of the persons representing a wide range of disciplines and experiences for the historical record. Another genealogical resource, again, we have music and film from every era created by and about people of African descent. We also have a number of video histories that I mentioned earlier. Some of the groups that they focus on were jazz musicians, Harlem Hospital doctors, choreographers, civil rights activists and filmmakers. To your left, you see William Greaves documentary filmmaker, probably one of the most popular divisions that we have the photographs and prints division because there's so many different types of photographs and images that they contain over a million images from mid 19th century graphics to contemporary documentary art and film photography. Photographers represented in the collection include Bert Andrews, Walker Evans, Chester Higgins Jr., Gordon Parks, Corrine Simpson, Doris Oman, James Van Dersey and Carl Van Vecten. The collection strengths which are again represented throughout Schomburg's collections and divisions include slavery, civil war, 19th century Caribbean and South America, modern civil rights movements performing in visual arts, organizations fraternal, social and political, religion, military, Harlem, such as street scenes, churches, housing and businesses and images of migrant and rural farm workers and families, sports figures and performing arts. We have a database called the images of African Americans from the 19th century. That's very useful. Working on by various subjects including cultural expression, religion, slavery, social life and customs. Let's go down here. There's a lovely group of African Americans singing and playing their instruments. Produced in the, you see the images here and the data information. And this is often used for a number of reasons but a lot of these photographs are in public domain. The Manuscripts, Archives and Rebooks Division, the division that I currently run contains a number of holdings including personal papers, records for individual and organizational records, subject or thematic collections, literary and scholarly typescripts, play scripts, broad size, programs and playbills, ephemera and rare books. Our subject emphasis over the years, even though we have over 200 subjects, 250 subjects, excuse me, include performing in the visual arts, women in the United States, Haitian history, African American religion, social culture and political history of Harlem, 20th century writers from the United States and the Caribbean, education in Africa and the United States, civil rights organizations and activities and researcher files for scholars and intellectuals. To your left you will see just an image from our Mandela celebration. It was a special exhibition to commemorate Mandela's birthday, July 18, 2013. Typically we have these really large exhibitions and so to fill in some of those spaces we're interested in doing smaller pop-up exhibitions for the time, you know, to commemorate specific things. Rare books for us, our rebel codeings date from the late 16th through the 20th century and although the book of the titles are pre, the book of the titles are 1865 imprints, languages again, English, French, Spanish, Dutch, German and Latin, and subject coverage includes anti-slavery issues in the US and the Caribbean, travel narratives in Africa and the Americas, biography, slavery in the Americas, history, literature and religion. We have a number of digitized books that appear in a number of our online exhibitions including Emotion and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, as well as the African American Women's Writers of the 19th Century. Over 41 full-length books representing several genres such as autobiographies, poetry, novels, compilation of freedom narratives. I just want to say, I'll stop here for a second. Can we say enslaved people? Can we say enslaved Africans rather than slaves? Can we do that? Can we, we can do that? Because I think that's a little more accurate. So I don't say slave narratives, I say freedom narratives. They're not, they're, I were talking about slavery, but they're actually talking about freedom, you know, and so I'm just out there. Good. Some of our, the genealogical resources in our division include church and cemetery records, insurance registers, orphanages records, slavery and manumission documents, plantation records, benevolent associations and individual and organizational collections. I'm going a little quickly here, but these are some of the materials that we have in our division. What might distinguish between myself and the National Archives and the Library of Congress is that we do interpretive programming around our collections. So we do genealogical workshops quarterly. We partner with the New York chapter of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society to help people learn how to do research at the Schomburg, but also in other institutions. We have a number of book talks and presentations where artists, writers, and folks come in and talk about their research methodologies which help lay people to kind of rethink or to think about how to go about researching their family histories. Exhibitions, of course, talks with curators about acquisitions, preservation, and access issues related to collections, film festivals and screenings. We often have open houses every October along with Archives Week, which is sponsored by the Archivist Roundtable, which is a week-long celebration in New York City where all the archival institutions or archival collections come together to celebrate through open houses, screenings, and so forth. So it brings the public in to kind of give a sense of what we do as archivists. I often tell people when they're coming to New York City to look at the other institutions in the area. Of course, the New Republic Library. There is a local genealogy department there. New York Historical Society has a number of records that deal with slavery, abolition. There's a New York African Free School records, which was a school to teach newly freed Africans how to, I guess, live if they didn't know how to live already. And local colleges and universities, such as Columbia University, and as Ahmad mentioned earlier, records of the antebellums, southern plantations from the Revolution through the Civil War are available there as well. Current and upcoming exhibitions now through July 4th. I have copies of our programming schedule here, and they're also available outside. I'd love to give you those. Schumberr collects WPA Artists 1935 to 1943, breaking the barriers, American Tennis Association, and Black Tennis pioneers. Highly enough, it stops in 1975. This was an exhibition that came to us, so it doesn't include Venus and Serena. Claiming Citizenship African Americans in the New Deal Photography and September 23rd, a lighthouse in New York commemorates the 80th anniversary of Antica and the Barbuda Progressive Society. Thank you very much. If you have any questions about our resources, I'll be glad to help. Thank you, Steven. I'm sorry there isn't time for questions at this stage. However, look closely. You know what they look like. You can find them. And despite the fact that I have a very long manuscript myself to deliver, I noted on the program that the next thing is lunch. And one thing I know is never get between a crowd and lunch. And therefore, I'd like you to join me in thanking our three panelists. And I hope the rest of the day is an education. I have been informed by the conference organizers that we will start promptly the next session in 60 minutes. So rather than 12.30 as noted on your program, we will start at 12.42. Thank you very much. Have a good day.