The Black New Yorkers: The Schomburg Illustrated Chronology

The Black New Yorkers is the companion volume to the Schomburg Center exhibit as well as a resource for the PBS history of New York City. With over 200 illustrations and 480 pages, it traces the nearly 400-year-old black presence in New York--from the appearance of the free Afro-Caribbean trader Jan Rodriguez in 1613, through the majesty of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, to the infamous 1998 Million Youth March. As Howard Dodson writes in his introduction, "Here is an unparalleled reference source designed to answer your questions about the history of Black New York," and "a fascinating story of great achievement and struggle in a dynamic global context." Indeed, we learn that West Indians and native-born blacks make Brooklyn, not Harlem, the largest concentration of people of African descent in the U.S. We also learn of Liberty, a mid-19th-century drawing of a black woman that may have been the model for the Statue of Liberty. We discover that the bebop revolution was ushered in by Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk in Harlem--and that salsa and Latin jazz were also born there, thanks to musicians such as Mario Bauza, Tito Puente, and Eddie Palmieri, who blended Afro-Cuban and Afro-American rhythms and musical forms. The collection also contains excellent biographical listings, from Samuel Cornish--founder of the abolitionist newspaper Freedom's Journal in 1827--to the city's first black mayor, David Dinkins. The Black New Yorkers reveals the wealth not only of the Big Apple but also of the Schomburg Center, arguably the most exhaustive resource on the African diaspora. --Eugene Holley Jr.