Arturo schomburg biography

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, collector, archivist, writer, activist, and important figure of the Harlem Renaissance was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico on January 24, 1874. His mother was a black woman originally from St.

Croix, Danish Virgin Islands (now the U.S. Virgin Islands), and his father was a Puerto Rican of German ancestry.

Seventeen-year-old Schomburg migrated to New York City in 1891. Very active in the liberation movements of Puerto Rico and Cuba, he founded, in 1892, Las dos Antillas, a cultural and political group that worked for the islands’ independence from Spain.

After the collapse of the Cuban revolutionary struggle, and the cession of Puerto Rico to the United States, Schomburg, disillusioned, turned his attention to the history and culture of Africa and what we know today as the African Diaspora.

In 1911, as its Master, he renamed El Sol de Cuba #38, a lodge of Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants, as Prince Hall Lodge in honor of the first African American freem