Pilgrimages

PILGRIMAGES

Travel for edification or spiritual enlightenment has long been an aspect of Black culture, whether in Black travelers seeking out their ancestral roots or a yearning for further vistas. 

In the case of Schomburg Center founder Arturo Schomburg, with the proceeds of selling his collection to jumpstart The New York Public Library’s Negro Division in 1926, he headed to Spain. There, in a pilgrimage to the origins of his first spoken language in Puerto Rico, he would acquire further rare items for his collection, reaffirming the international, multilingual nature of the Schomburg Center’s mission. 

Other Black journeys are represented in travel by political, musical, and other leaders, including expatriates such as James Baldwin in Algeria and Maya Angelou in Ghana. Such pilgrimages would also include Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and his trip to India taken with Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, the second curator of the Schomburg Collection after Arturo Schomburg. Red-dick’s Polaroid snapshots of Dr. King and Coretta Scott King abroad convey the ease of their relationship, but also Reverend King’s wish to pay tribute in person to the late Mahatma Gandhi and his lessons of nonviolence. Malcolm X paid an important visit to Mecca and the African continent in 1964 on the holy journey of Hajj asked of all Muslims. There he took photographs and home movies, seen here, and sent postcards to friends and loved ones, including these seen here to activists and actors Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. Malcolm X’s correspondence finds him in a playful and contemplative mood, one accompanied by a change of thinking from separatist to pan-African thought—and his growing a goatee. The civil rights leader’s various evolutions reveal the ways that in African American journeys, travel is both a catalyst for and a sign of change.