The Press Is Like the Safety Valve of a Boiler
Arturo Schomburg’s distinguished career, which led to the establishment of the New York Public Library collection that is now called the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, began in the clubs and publications of the Cuban and Puerto Rican independence movement of New York City. Born in Puerto Rico in 1874, Schomburg moved to New York City in 1891, where he befriended Rafael Serra, met José Martí, joined the Revolutionary Committee of Puerto Rico, and in 1892 co-founded the Club Las Dos Antillas (Two Islands Club) to advocate for Cuban and Puerto Rican independence. He served as its secretary for most of the 1890s. As scholars have discussed, the archiving and publishing practices that Schomburg learned in his teenage years through political organizing and publishing in late 19th-century Nueva York played a role in his later innovations in making history. According to scholars Laura Helton and Rafia Zafar, “The documentary zeal of the revolutionaries likely fed young Schomburg’s penchant for archiving, and indeed some of the books in his collection date from this period, including Teófilo Domínguez’s Figuras y figuritas.” His participation in late 19th-century Nueva York also informed his later writings for the New York Times, the New Century, and The Crisis. Scholar Kevin Meehan has argued that Schomburg built on and updated “the nineteenth-century liberal romantic and nascent revolutionary nationalism of Martí” by bringing together African and Caribbean perspectives on decolonialism and activism. Schomburg’s method involved not only assembling his famous archive, but also organizing and writing to make it publicly available — both as a record of “historical agency in the black working masses” and a source of inspiration for ongoing cultural and political activism.
The 16 letters-to-the-editor that Schomburg published in the New York Times between 1901 and 1905 provide a revealing window on the transformation that took place both for Schomburg and for Nueva York after the end of the Spanish-Cuban-American War. Since so many of the organizers of the Cuban and Puerto Rican independence movement moved back to Cuba or had died in the war, Nueva York underwent a major transformation almost overnight. As Helton and Zafar have noted, “After 1898 … Schomburg lost his political community, and like many other Afro-Cubans and Afro-Puerto Ricans frustrated by a stalled revolutionary project, he had to reinvent himself ” while “watching racial injustices unfold simultaneously in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the United States.” It was during that period that Schomburg offered his perspective to the New York Times on a range of topics related to his antiracist agenda, including U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico, lynching, and disenfranchisement of Black voters in the United States.
In the pages of the New York Times, Schomburg positions himself as a voice of reason and a moral compass, calling on the United States to live up to its democratic ideals. At times, he states his position from the perspective of a Puerto Rican observing the aftermath of 1898 on the island. In a letter entitled “Questions by a Porto Rican,” published on August 9, 1902, Schomburg addresses the U.S. Immigration Bureau policy of “prohibiting the coming to the United States of residents and natives of Porto Rico and the Philippines, except after passing the same examination as is enforced against other alien immigrants” who are not from territories of the United States. His letter points out the unspoken prejudice behind such policies: “Does the citizen naturalized in Porto Rico and the citizen naturalized in Ohio differ in any degree of excellence? They are American citizens, and as such entitled to the privileges and immunities enjoyed by all citizens of the United States.” In this period preceding the 1917 Jones-Shafroth Act, which granted statutory U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans, Schomburg calls attention to the second-class status afforded to “the Territories.” It was also a period when the New York Times and many other leading Anglophone dailies “promoted themes of underdevelopment, inferiority, and spectacle” in coverage of the new U.S. territories even as so-called journalistic objectivity became the guiding principle of the news industry. Schomburg repeatedly calls out such moments of racism and hypocrisy in his letters to the New York Times, as he addresses a range of contemporary issues, in measured and direct prose.
Several of his letters address lynching, as in his June 28, 1903, letter, “Lynching a Savage Relic,” in which he observes, “The letter on ‘The Law’s Delay,’ published by you on June 24, seems to have been written while the mind was under some heavy emotional impulses.” Schomburg takes issue with “the statement that the mob who lynched and burned a negro murderer at Wilmington, Del., was ‘composed of average American citizens, of men very much like us.’” Positioning himself on rational and moral higher ground, Schomburg argues,
There is a feeling among Christian people when an outcast has committed a horrible murder that the majesty of the law ought to be allowed to punish him with the severest penalty. This is preferable to having “men like the rest of us” take the law in their hands, usurp established justice, and create in its place the partial administration of justice and punishment of culprits to the satisfaction of mob rule.
He exposes this effort to disguise the horror and irrationality of mob rule as the will of “average American citizens.” He makes visible the hypocrisy and immorality of such a claim: “Those who took part in the Wilmington (Del.) lynching ‘constitute a representative American community,’ says the letter, but the moral reasoning is weak: for what is the use of fixed principles of right and wrong if they are to be treated as mere abstractions and not as the practical guide of conduct?” As Schomburg’s question asks readers to consider the immorality of mob rule, it also invites consideration of the unspoken racial lines drawn by the claim of its link to “a representative American community.”
Another powerful intervention appears in Schomburg’s December 20, 1903, letter, “Union League Club’s Actions,” in which he points out the systemic racism experienced by Black communities of the U.S. South: “The Constitutions of various Southern States are not only in open opposition to the United States Constitution, but actually in contravention of the very Declaration of Independence,” enabling “notorious practices by which those States are depriving the negroes from the lawful exercise of their political and natural rights.” By asserting that these state constitutions defy the founding principles of the United States, Schomburg invites his readers to recognize their deeply cynical practices of voter disenfranchisement: “Who will deny that the various qualifications or clauses were not carefully drawn up by the offending States as traps to positively deprive the majority of negroes from the exercise of their political rights?” As Schomburg’s letters identify and ask readers to recognize instances of racism in the United States and its territories, they also reveal something of his view of the possibilities of print at this transitional stage in his career.
In his letter from October 18, 1903, “Tillman Trial and Verdict,” Schomburg lauds as “just and fair criticism of how things can be done without impunity and without danger in South Carolina” a Times editorial that denounced the acquittal of South Carolina Lieutenant Governor James Tillman in his trial for the murder of newspaper editor Narciso Gener Gonsales. Tillman fatally shot Gonsales for what he saw as irreparable harm to his reputation caused by Gonsales’ newspaper, and he argued successfully in court that the murder was an act of self-defense. This trial, which pitted Tillman’s sense of Southern honor against Gonsales’s right to press freedom, inspires Schomburg to articulate his own view of the press:
The press is like the safety valve of a boiler—always ready to blow through printed papers the abuses or unlawful acts done against the welfare, peace, and prosperity of the community. It checks the spirit of anarchy and tyranny, and like the bugle call, is ready to reverberate the sound of danger and bring to the defense of the State the good citizens to remove the oppressor and re-establish the proper conditions of order.
Schomburg’s words describe the role that his own editorials play in the Times — as well as a view of the newspaper that reaches back to 19th-century Nueva York. By releasing and exposing the hot air of unlawful abuse and corruption through the solid material of print on paper, the press diffuses tensions and protects communities. When necessary, it also sounds the alarm, calling the community to action to fight off oppression. It is a vision of the press that Schomburg acknowledges in his letter “seems to be in peril of death in the State of South Carolina.”
Schomburg’s run of letters to the editor written to the New York Times ends around 1905, and his subsequent writing appeared primarily in the Black press — suggesting another change in his approach by the 1910s. His article “General Evaristo Estenoz” for the July 1912 issue of The Crisis exhibits such a shift, while demonstrating how Schomburg carried on the legacy of 19th-century Nueva York. Scholar Vanessa Valdés has categorized Schomburg’s essays from this period as crónicas, arguing that Schomburg made use of the genre because it “afforded a discursive space for the introduction of Spanish-speaking men of African descent in periodicals written and read by an Anglophone African diasporic audience.”
Schomburg’s “General Evaristo Estenoz” starts with a news item: “The cable has flashed over the world the news that in Cuba General Evaristo Estenoz has taken up the gage of battle for the rights of his dark fellowmen, and that a crisis in Cuba is the result.” In addition, like Martí, who wrote many of his crónicas about the United States for an audience in Latin America, Schomburg needed to explain this news item to an audience — in this case Anglophone African American readers — that was likely unfamiliar with the news and its context. He references his late friend Serra, explaining that “soon after the close of the Cuban War and the establishment of the republic, he [Evaristo Estenoz] associated himself with Rafael Serra, the lamented Negro philosopher.” Serra and Estenoz, Schomburg explains, became the architects of a new Independent Colored Party in Cuba, “its object being to promote the interests of the colored race, to urge the government to recognize their rights as citizens and taxpayers, and to accord them a fair proportion of the elective and appointive offices.” As in his letters to the New York Times, Schomburg makes a rationally and morally grounded case for equality and justice, noting Serra’s book For Whites and Blacks, which argues that “since both races had fought to make the republic possible, they should enjoy in common the burdens and the benefits of the country,” is a founding text of the Independent Colored Party (ICP). The essay also references the ICP’s newspaper, Previsión (Foresight), edited by Estenoz, as an indication of the party’s widespread popularity — and also perhaps a demonstration of the ideal role of the newspaper that Schomburg shared in the New York Times: “So great was the demand for this publication that the press could not turn out enough copies to supply the thousands of readers.” The healthy demand for the party’s newspaper serves as evidence of its democratic success. The essay explains that the recent turmoil in Cuba is a result of the suppression of this party and its movement.
The remainder of the essay describes the organized and violent repression of the ICP: “The Negroes began to realize, when their leaders were thrown into prison on the eve of election, that the white Cubans had determined that they should not have any representation save what was bestowed on them as a charity.” We see here the themes of injustice and hypocrisy that also appeared in the New York Times letters:
Many Cuban Negroes curse the dawn of the Republic. Negroes were welcomed in the time of oppression, in the time of hardship, during the days of the revolution, but in the days of peace and of white immigration they are deprived of positions, ostracized and made political outcasts. The Negro has done much for Cuba; Cuba has done nothing for the Negro.
This is a heart-wrenching observation coming from someone who experienced the hope and energy of 19th-century Nueva York firsthand. Far from realizing the dream of racial equality in a democratic republic, Afro-Cubans and Afro-Puerto Ricans view the new nation as a curse and an oppressive and extractive force: “The black men of Cuba have taken to the woods because conditions are intolerable, because, as my friend, the late Jose Marti, the apostle of Cuban freedom, said: ‘So long as there remains one injustice to repair in Cuba the revolutionary redemption has not finished its work.’” Only in his concluding lines, in calling Martí a friend, does he choose to divulge something of his proximity to the situation in Cuba. He does so in the context of acknowledging that the work of Nueva York—namely, the dream of a democratic Cuban republic — is an unfinished project. This reference to work in progress might be the essay’s tightest link to the crónica genre. “General Evaristo Estenoz” participates in the crónica genre for its optimistic attempt to write a better world into existence, no matter how terrible the odds might seem. Schomburg himself suggests something of this optimism in another New York Times letter, in which he reflects on the racism faced by Black Americans: “I believe that if we were to try to better things, try to be a little more optimistic in our views, these matters can be remedied: we may succeed in time in partly overcoming the existing conditions without sacrificing genuine affections for doubtful ones.” This radical hope might be considered one of the legacies of 19th-century Nueva York that Schomburg carried into both his writing and his work as a researcher and collector of archival materials relevant to Black history and culture.
Schomburg seeks to put the past in conversation with the present. He does so by taking on a much broader swath of the archival record. As scholar César Salgado has argued, Schomburg’s collecting was ambitious both for its geographic and historical reach, as he set out to create “an archive that could redefine the Renaissance as the Afro-Latin cultural outcome of Southern European and North-and-Central African socioeconomic and migratory exchange and integration at the very moment of transatlantic expansion.” For Schomburg, recovering this history is necessary not simply to set the record straight, but also to blaze a path forward for achieving a more just world.
From that perspective, we might reconsider one of Schomburg’s most widely read texts, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” published in the March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic and reprinted that same year in The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke. The text, which might also be associated with the crónica genre, is a call to action, a manifesto, a declaration of a new possibility unfolding:
History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset. So among the rising democratic millions we find the Negro thinking more collectively, more retrospectively than the rest, and apt out of the very pressure of the present to become the most enthusiastic antiquarian of them all.
Schomburg’s words recall Martí’s tendency to write about possibilities unfolding: “Democratic millions” are rising and “thinking more collectively” as they look toward the past to address the challenges of the present. Schomburg also emphasizes the significance of the collective in his archival findings: “But weightier surely than any evidence of individual talent and scholarship could ever be, is the evidence of important collaboration and significant pioneer initiative in social service and reform, in the efforts toward race emancipation, colonization and race betterment.” His words emphasize the significance of collaboration to advance racial justice that has happened in the past, and he points out that this is an ongoing project that must be undertaken so that “the full story of human collaboration and interdependence may be told and realized.” He suggests that he is not looking for individual heroes of history, but rather the webs of organizing — networks, we might say, like that of 19th-century Nueva York. Given his experience in that very community, Schomburg would have known what to look for, and he also knew how to model such collaboration in his own work.
Excerpted from Printing Nueva York: Spanish-Language Print Culture, Media Change, and Democracy in the Late Nineteenth Century by Kelley Kreitz. Copyright © 2026 New York University. Excerpted with permission of New York University Press. All rights reserved.
