“History Must Restore What Slavery Took Away”

“History must restore what slavery took away.” So wrote Arthur Schomburg (1874–1938), a writer and bibliophile, for the Harlem Issue of the March 1925 Survey Graphic and later published in Alain Locke’s New Negro (1925). Schomburg’s fuller statement reads as follows:

The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. … For him, a group tradition must supply compensation for persecution, and pride of race the antidote for prejudice. History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset. ¹