Back in 2021, the Schomburg hosted an exhibition highlighting the history of Black travel and migration in the United States. Available online, Traveling While Black: A Century of Pleasure & Pain & Pilgrimage shares an important history that has concequences still felt to this day.

Whether in the horrors of the Middle Passage or the rebellion of Maroon communities made up of escaped slaves, travel has meant much—and something much more—for Africans in the Americas. This exhibition, our first as we celebrate The New York Public Library’s 125th anniversary and the Schomburg Center’s 95th, explores over a century of travel. Moving from the Great Migration of African Americans north and west at the start of the twentieth century to the restrictions and resistances of travel in the Jim Crow South and the Jane Crow North, Traveling While Black examines a history of travel, from those who found themselves exiles within their own country down to the pilgrims and pleasure seekers of our time.

See the online gallery here.