Dr. Kahlil Gibran Muhammad, formerly an assistant professor of history at Indiana University, was named director of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at a press conference Nov. 17, 2010. On the flight home that day, Muhammad glanced over to see his seatmate unfold the New York Times’ Arts and Leisure section and there he was, smiling back at himself from the front page.
“Talk about a learning curve,” says the 38-year-old great-grandson of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad and author of The Condemnation of Blackness, who has succeeded longtime Schomburg leader Howard Dodson. “I couldn’t hide in my 8-by-8-foot faculty office anymore.”
By the following July, Muhammad was back in New York City, submerged in a crash course on the Schomburg’s massive holdings and confronting the reality that libraries are scrambling to reinvent themselves in a world where information can be conjured up by a finger stroke on a hand-held computer screen. [Elena Oumano]
CityArts: What are you doing to reach out to young people?
Dr. Kahlil Gilbran Muhammad, director of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Photo courtesy of NYPL
Khalil Gibran Muhammad: We’re not focused strictly on literacy; we’re also interested in historical and cultural literacy, and that kills two birds with one stone. We want young people to read more, consume and take advantage of the arts, and we want them to have a context and deeper understanding of where these ideas come from, how they evolved and why they’re relevant today. We’ve developed partnerships with other leaders of educational institutions in this community who address this need for consciousness and critical engagement and develop young people’s sense of having a stake in these debates and institutions.
Our Saturday Junior Scholars Program focuses on the African Diaspora, African-American history, performing arts, visual arts, scholarship and journalism and teaches how to reengineer ideas from the past to express yourself in the present so you can become inspired, critically engaged and take on the world through the lens of an understanding that everything that meets the eye isn’t a reflection of reality, that there are often many layers to peel away.
The prospect of Def Jam founders Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin leaving their papers to the Schomburg has come up.
We’re figuring out how to sell preservation to the hip-hop generation. We have John Coltrane’s sheet music, which makes sense as paper evidence of growth in composition. But it’s different with beat box machines and digital sampling. One, it’s more material than written down and two, for the founders of hip-hop in particular, because things weren’t written down in that traditional way, we have to meet them where they are and focus on the AV preservation part of it. That’s new.
Part of the conversation I’ll have with these artists is also about scraps of paper that get translated into published music, because that’s part of the process. Many of them don’t think of it that way. It’s fascinating, because you’d think this is an obvious meeting of the minds, a mutual interest, but it’s also challenging because cultural institutions like the Schomburg don’t have the same resonance they did for earlier generations.
It’s like the black church: Everyone of any significance, except for a small minority of converted Muslims, went through the black church. Whether they got their vocal training or political skills, the black church was at the center of everything. The Schomburg was a cultural, secular equivalent—particularly for people in New York and people who engage in the arts. That’s no longer true. The church has lost its foothold and so have cultural institutions like the Schomburg.
The Schomburg was founded during the Harlem Renaissance. Is there a need for another Harlem Renaissance?
We’re in the midst of a renaissance, in terms of literary and cultural production. African Americans and black folk from various parts of the world are producing a tremendous amount of work, and our challenge is to support the cultural work of this community, whether it’s small, grassroots theaters, authors or artists. We see a cultural intimacy that didn’t exist on this scale in earlier generations, but there’s a lack of appreciation for the social and economic context that still undergirds the reality of segregated lives.
Most black children attend overwhelmingly segregated schools; blacks and whites still don’t live together in major cities. Economic inequality has grown worse rather than better. We’re trying to address that cultural sensibility, that sense of being part of something bigger through engaged programming.
Our new programs Stage for Debate and Talks at the Schomburg bring these issues together. Stage returns to the performance of engaging ideas instead of panels or moderated discussions, where people are mostly polite and not necessarily rigorously engaging each other. We want to take two people with published records who oppose each other’s points of view on important issues, like racial identity. This is not about personality or demagogy but issues such as what are the basic operating assumptions about who black people are in the 21st century, which underlies a lot of today’s literary production. That raises the literacy of young people in that they can embrace complexity because that’s exactly the world we live in.
We’re planning a major innovative hip-hop exhibition for 2013 that won’t be just a celebration but a take on hip-hop as a historical phenomenon—what was the context, how has it evolved? What are the contours of its reach and influence? What were the foundation’s successes and mistakes? We want to be a platform for those conversations and document them. When we look back, we don’t want to run into people anywhere in New York City who say, “I’ve never been to the Schomburg Center.”
Not only is it about celebrating the legacy of so many giants and lesser-known folk, it’s also about investing in this institution and making sure that the work black people have done then and now continues to be celebrated and be a central thread in the fabric of the American story.
