There's something about the way an old book feels in my hands.

The way the rough, human binding and browning pages somehow carry the traces of every person

who's ever touched it before me.

The same is true of photographs, records, old tools.

I hear their voices, I feel their triumphs and their tragedies.

I'm transported to a different time and place.

Yet mostly, I feel connected.

One of my favorite pieces of art, Jacob Lawrence's Schomburg Library, connects me in the

very same way.

I'm pulled into a world buzzing with a deep sense of community, curiosity and aspiration.

It's the artwork that started this journey that we're calling Harlem on my mind.

The inspiration for that Lawrence print, Harlem's Schomburg Center for Research in Black

Culture, is a place where our past still lives and breathes.

And to understand this place and its role in shaping Black identity, you have to understand

the unlikely story of how it came to be and the story of the man whose name is on the

building.

It all began in the late 19th century in a small town on the island of Puerto Rico, with

words from a white teacher to a little black boy named Arturo Schomburg.

The story that I always think of that still gives me goose bumps to this day.

You know, he was an Afro-Portarican and he asked a school teacher when he was in grade

school about Black history.

That's Shalulinch, a curator at the Schomburg.

...