Wayne State University English Professor Kathryne Lindberg has won a scholar-in-residence fellowship at the Schomburg Center for the Study of Black Culture at the Schomburg Research Center of the New York Public Library. Lindberg, a Detroit resident, also is an adjunct faculty member in the Africana studies department at WSU.

She received the award for a book-in-progress whose working title is From Claude McKay to Huey Newton: Revolutionary Inter-communalism and Black Syndicalist Lyrics. The book, under contract with Princeton University Press, is due in December.

The fellowship carries a stipend of $15,000 for six months residence at the center. During the residency Lindberg will participate in the center's scholarly seminars and colloquia, as well as other educational activities.

Arturo Schomburg and the library/cultural center he founded were an essential part of the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance, Lindberg said. The center named after him is one of three special research centers of the New York Public Library.

The holdings of the Schomburg make up the most important and perhaps oldest collection of African American and black diasporic literature, letters, rare books and archives in the U.S., if not the world, according to Lindberg.

Lindberg has been using the Schomburg collection for years, frequently working in its section of Jamaican newspapers.

"I do a lot of work with unpublished and unpublicized work and Schomburg has some wonderful things," she said.

"The center is a really marvelous place. It's a new, very modern archive and quality library yet it is adjacent to Schomburg's home, where he used to have salons and meet with writers. It's not very usual for a black citizen to have the means to put together a collection that was a community center.

"The current Schomburg Center is not a museum full of artifacts or passé textual remains," Lindberg said. "More than an exclusive salon, it's a vital center of reading, writing and public performances. Also, it's just around the corner from the Countee Cullen Branch of the New York Public Library where, in that building named after another key Harlem Renaissance figure, borrowers can check out materials they might have found in the Research Center.

"I'm expecting my work will reflect the importance of research at the Schomburg Center for an understanding of linkages between art, politics, newspapers and independent information sources that remain among African and New World or diasporic African peoples. It's a very open library with a lot of public programs; any public patron can come in and use it."

Artist-intellectuals covered in Lindberg's book include Jean Toomer, Gwendolyn Brooks, Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois, Bob Kaufman, Ray Durem and Robert F. Williams, and Huey Newton.

Lindberg said there is much depth and interconnectedness of research materials between the Schomburg in New York and several sites in the Detroit metro area. Her own work has called upon Wayne State's Walter P. Reuther Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, the University of Michigan's Labadee Collection of radical literature and magazines, and the Michigan State Historical Society. Detroit has been a "struggle city," a unique site of self-determination for black industrial workers, she said.

"Many of our citizens indirectly appreciate these local collections, including those at the Detroit Public Library, but I would like to see more research and creative projects from kindergarten through 12th grades all the way through the Ph.D., that highlight Detroit histories and put these in conversation with other renaissances," Lindberg said.

Before beginning her residency in New York, Lindberg and Todd Duncan, her colleague in English and Africana studies at WSU, prepared for publication an interview with Grace Lee Boggs, a Detroit scholar-activist. Scholars and politicians, working at Wayne State and in the Detroit Cultural Center, are beginning to recover the recent past, including the strong visions and voices of Detroit from World War II through the 1960s to today, Lindberg said.

Lindberg notes that the annual convention of the American Studies Association, a large professional organization of humanists and social scientists, will be held in Detroit in 2001. This, as well as events directly connected to the300th anniversary of the city, will be a place to view and to show the ongoing cultural history and the spirit of Detroit, she said.

Note to editors: Lindberg can be reached in New York for interviews. To contact her, call the WSU Public Relations Department at (313) 577-2150.