Slave Trade Monument in Zanzibar.
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is establishing a major new center for the analysis of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the only such center based in a public research library, Schomburg officials said on Thursday.
It will be called the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Trans-Atlantic Slavery and endowed with a $2.5 million gift from Ruth and Sid Lapidus. Mr. Lapidus is a retired partner in the equity investment firm Warburg Pincus.
The donation is the Schomburg’s single largest private gift. It includes about 400 rare books and other printed material about the slave trade. The gift will enable the Schomburg, at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard, at 135th Street, in Harlem, to offer fellowships to scholars and to hire staff for the center.
“It’s a big deal,” Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the director of the Schomburg, said on Thursday. “With this center, we are putting the equivalent of a neon sign on the door saying we want people to study this topic.”
The Schomburg houses an extensive trove of books, manuscripts, art, films and photographs related to the global black experience and can take advantage of the resources at other New York public libraries. The new center will support the work of scholars, students and educators and will eventually generate events like symposiums on slavery.
Expected to open next January, it will share space with the Scholars in Residence Program, which has a conference room and offices on the lower level of the Schomburg. Sylviane A. Diouf, a scholar on the history of slavery and the Schomburg’s curator of digital collections, will manage the new center, which will offer two six-month residencies and 10 three-month residencies.
“After much reflection and consideration of other deserving alternatives, we decided that the Schomburg is the most appropriate place for these books and other materials on the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,” Mr. Lapidus said in a statement. He has a large collection of books and pamphlets on American history, and has given some of it to Princeton University, the New-York Historical Society and elsewhere.
“The center is just going to be a wonderful boon to scholars,” Christopher L. Brown, a history professor at Columbia University who directs its Society of Fellows in the Humanities, said on Thursday. “It will galvanize the study of slavery and antislavery in New York and bring scholars to the region who might have gone other places. There is no question that having these resources in a public institution offers much greater access.”