Charles Blockson's grade school teacher told him Black people have no history. He set out to prove h

Charles Blockson's grade school teacher told him Black people have no history. He set out to prove h

Charles Blockson's grade school teacher told him Black people have no history. He set out to prove h

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Charles Blockson’s grade school teacher told him Black people have no history. He set out to prove her wrong

Blockson wrote about the fourth-grade incident in his memoir: "Damn Rare: The Memoirs of an African-American Bibliophile." He had raised his hand to ask his teacher why she never discussed Black people’s historical achievements.

The teacher replied: “Negroes have no history. They were born to serve white people.”

From that day on, he would make it his life’s mission to search for, collect, preserve, and teach the history of Black people in America and all over the world.

…

The Centre Theater Gallery exhibition chronicles his life and work as a historian, author, bibliophile, and collector of books, historical documents, art, and other items about the history of Black Americans and Black people all over the world.

Blockson curated both the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University Libraries and the Charles L. Blockson Collection of African-Americana and the African Diaspora at Penn State University Libraries. His achievement has been compared to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture that Arturo Alfonso Schomburg , an Afro-Puerto Rican, founded in New York in 1925.

In 2010, Blockson donatedHarriet Tubman’s shawl, along with other Tubman artifacts to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C., six years before the museum opened in September 2016.

According to the Smithsonian, Queen Victoria had presented the silk lace and linen shawl to the famous abolitionist and Civil War hero in England around 1897.

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