Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, and with us now, Joy Bivins the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. It's a branch of the New York Public Library, if you don't know, at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard at 130 fifth street. Joy Bivins was appointed to the position just last year. Regular listeners know the previous directors, the poet, and New Yorker poetry editor Kevin Young has been on multiple times, as has the director, before him Khalil Gibran Muhammad, who is just back for another appearance in another context this fall.

Director Bivins, it's an honor to have you on the show welcome to WNYC on this Martin Luther King national holiday.

Joy Bivins: Thank you, it's an honor to be here, and happy MLK day holiday to you.

Brian Lehrer: For people who don't know it, can you give listeners an introduction to the Schomburg Center, they may be thinking what, it's a research center, is it a museum, but it's a library? What's the Schomburg Center?

Joy Bivins: The Schomburg Center is one of the four research libraries of the New York Public Library system. As you mentioned, our address is in the Heart of Harlem in New York city. What we do at the Schomburg, and what we have done for the last 96 or so years, is to collect and document the histories and cultures of people of African descent, through objects, through rare books, through manuscripts and then to share those those objects or those riches with a wide selection of patrons or a wide audience.

Yes, we do serve folks in reading rooms and you can come and do your research, but we also have this other aspect of who we are as the Schomburg Center. We do do exhibition and we do do programs and we have educational projects or programs, that really bring in young people. We are a library, but we have a lot of different functions. Sometimes we do get confused as being a museum or a community center, but at our heart, we are a research library and we are here to serve researchers and share these tremendous riches that we have been collecting and acquiring for nearly a century.

Brian Lehrer: Let me give you a chance to mention two of the current exhibitions. One, I see you have a Black Comic Books Festival this weekend. People say, "Black Comic Books at a library? That's supposed to be where you go to get away from comic book." That was switched to virtual because of Omicron, but tell people about that.

Joy Bivins: Sure. This past weekend we'll actually it began on Thursday and then on Saturday, was the 10th annual Schomburg Center Black Comic Book Festival. For the past 10 years, mostly in person, the last two years have been virtual because of the pandemic, we have welcomed comic book lovers, cosplay lovers into the Schomburg Center, really to celebrate this aspect of Black creativity. While we look at comic books specifically, we're also looking at speculative fiction and Afrofuturism, so all of the ways in which these types of artists, these illustrators, these authors are really portraying a potential Black future and also, using very important or significant subjects and interpreting them in a different way through comics.

There's an aspect of comics that is fun and reminds us of our youth and all of the imaginary things that we used to do as young people, but there's also an aspect of this Comic Book Festival, which is really about celebrating Black creativity through this particular medium and it is after all, a book. As a library, we have collected comics and supported comics throughout our history, so it's something that is part of our collection as well and it's a really unique way, I think.

I haven't actually experienced it in person because I've been here only through the pandemic, to celebrate and bring in a different part of our community into the Schomburg Center. It is family oriented, but also, it's a bit edgier and allows people to play. I think that's important when you are learning, play is a very important aspect of really engaging people in text, in work, so it's something that I think it fits the Schomburg just right.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, it's not new despite my joking around about it before, that serious literature is done in the format of a graphic novel or call it what you will.

Joy Bivins: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: You're also, I see, in the final week of another exhibition called subversion and the art of slavery abolition, what's in that one?

Joy Bivins: These are really two distinct exhibitions that are up right now. Boundless, which celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Black Comic Book Festival opened on Friday at 12 noon and it is free to the public and really features the history of the Black Comic Book Festival, but also, highlights some of the wonderful objects that we had in our collection. Whereas subversion has been up nearly two years now and it really is a chance for us to focus on these significant rare books and manuscripts and illustrations and photographs that are within the Schomburg collection specifically, but there are also other objects drawn from other branches of the New York Public Library, that really look at the ways in which people of African descent in this instance, African Americans, were the advocates for their own emancipation.

It sets up what enslavement was, but it then goes quickly into the ways in which Black people emancipated themselves, Black people participated within the Abolition Movement and it highlights these wonderful objects that are quite rare, to have an opportunity to see up close and personal. One of the things that is bread and butter or hallmark for the Schomburg Center are these rare books, so within this exhibition you get to see the first edition of Frederick Douglass' first autobiography and you also are seeing Equiano's encounter with enslavement. These are books that date from the 19th, the 18th century and so it really is a wonderful opportunity to showcase what we have and ultimately exhibition-

Brian Lehrer: It must give people chills when they see something like that.

Joy Bivins: I think it gives people chills to know that they are accessible. One of the beautiful things about the library, is that you could be an academic researcher, but you can also just be someone who is very curious and come make an appointment at the Schomburg and have an experience with these objects on your own. These are treasures, but they are treasures, but they are accessible to you.

As well in this exhibition, we have a death book. It's really an insurance book, which identifies enslaved people and what they're worth and what their owners would be reimbursed for, should they pass away and this is from the Nautilus Company. There are some really unique objects in here in that exhibition and really give a good glimpse into what the Schomburg has been up to for the last 96 years.

Brian Lehrer: Few more minutes with Joy Bivins director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, branch of the New York Public Library at 515 Malcolm X, at 130 fifth street in Harlem. For the uninitiated, who was Arturo Schomburg?

Joy Bivins: Oh, wonderful question. Arturo Schomburg, whose birthday is actually next Monday January 24th, was an Afro Puerto Rican, bibliophile collector, activist, advocate who made it his life's mission to prove that people of African descent had contributed to, not just the culture of the Western hemisphere, but to world culture.

The way that he did this is through collecting rare books, collecting ephemera, manuscripts, artwork. In 1926 his collection was purchased by the New York Public Library and that forms basically, the seed of what became the Schomburg Center collections. Mr. Schomburg was also the curator of that collection before it was named the Schomburg Collection, up until his death in 1938. We celebrate him as really a linkage between people of African descent and the Western Hemisphere. He was told as a child, that Black people really had done nothing to warrant any celebration within world history, within history. A teacher told him that's why they never studied Black people. He went about proving or disproving that that was the case through these collections.

Really, he is the ultimate collector activist or using collections as a mode of activism to prove the history of Black people, indeed, did exist.

Brian Lehrer: You want to hear one spontaneous testimonial from a caller?

Joy Bivins: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: It's Wendy in Springfield, New Jersey. Hi, Wendy, you're on WNYC. We've got about a minute for you.

Wendy: Hi, I'm Wendy from Springfield now, but I used to be Wendy from Harlem, born and raised. Although my mother worked three jobs to send me to a private school, the best in New York City, when we got to Black history, all they said was the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, and that was it. My white friend said to me, "Slavery couldn't have been so bad, nobody ran away." We started doing research papers in eighth grade. I went to the Schomburg and from 8th grade to 12th grade, every research paper I did was based on information from the Schomburg. I used primary sources, which still surprised my teachers. I got As in every paper.

I want to thank you, because this is where I got my Black history education. Now, I'm proud to say that I have a book, an extraordinary life, Josephine E. Jones, accepted by the Schomburg and I'm so grateful. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for your call.

Joy Bivins: Fantastic. That is wonderful. It's a story we hear a lot, that this library and institutions similar to it, are really critical in filling in those gaps about Black history or the history and culture of people of African descent, because it's not always part of the curricula that young people are exposed to. Some of what a couple callers had said before, much of this work had to be done on your own. You had to create your own curriculum, as a way of learning what Black people have contributed to the history of the world or to the history of the nation. Institutions like ours are really important in making sure that these stories or these people are not forgotten.

Brian Lehrer: Joy Bivins, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a branch of the New York Public Library at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard, at 135th Street in Harlem. Thank you so much for joining us today. This was great.

Joy Bivins: Thank you for having me.

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