By JAYLEN GREEN

NEW YORK (AP) — It is one of the largest repositories of Black history in the country — and its most devoted supporters say not enough people know about it. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture hoped to change that Saturday, as it celebrated its centennial with a festival combining two of its marquee annual events.

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The Black Comic Book Festival and the Schomburg Literary Festival ran across a full day and featured readings, panel discussions, workshops, children’s story times and cosplay, as well as a vendor marketplace. Saturday’s celebration took over 135th Street in Manhattan between Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell boulevards.

Founded in New York City during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, the Schomburg Center will spend the next year exhibiting signature objects curated from its massive catalog of Black literature, art, recordings and films.

Artists, writers and community leaders have gone the center to be inspired, root their work in a deep understanding of the vastness of the African diaspora, and spread word of the global accomplishments of Black people.

It is also the kind of place that, in an era of backlash against race-conscious education and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, exists as a free and accessible branch of the New York Public Library system. It’s open to the public during regular business hours, but its acclaimed research division requires an appointment.

“The longevity the Schomburg has invested in preserving the traditions of the Black literary arts is worth celebrating, especially in how it sits in the canon of all the great writers that came beforehand,” said Mahogany Brown, an author and poet-in-residence at the Lincoln Center, who participated in the literary festival.

On Saturday, Dr. Jenny Uguru, director of nursing quality at NYC Health and Hospitals, said the Schomburg Center “stands as an archive to celebrate, recognize and uplift what Black people bring to the table, will bring to future tables.”

This photo provided by the New York Public Library shows an exhibit in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York on May 6, 2025. (Jonathan Blanc/New York Public Library via AP)

For the centennial, the Schomburg’s leaders have curated more than 100 items for an exhibition that tells the center’s story through the objects, people, and the place — the historically Black neighborhood of Harlem — that shaped it. Those objects include a visitor register log from 1925-1940 featuring the signatures of Black literary icons and thought leaders, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes; materials from the Fab 5 Freddy collection, documenting the earliest days of hip-hop; and actor and director Ossie Davis’ copy of the “Purlie Victorious” stage play script.

An audio guide to the exhibition has been narrated by actor and literacy advocate LeVar Burton, the former host of the long-running TV show “Reading Rainbow.”

Whether they are new to the center or devoted supporters, visitors to the centennial exhibition will get a broader understanding of the Schomburg’s history, the communities it has served, and the people who made it possible, said Joy Bivins, the Director of the Schomburg Center, who curated the centennial collection.

“Visitors will understand how the purposeful preservation of the cultural heritage of people of African descent has generated and fueled creativity across time and disciplines,” Bivins said.

Novella Ford, associate director of public programs and exhibitions, said the Schomburg Center approaches its work through a Black lens, focusing on Black being and Black aliveness as it addresses current events, theories, or issues.

“We’re constantly connecting the present to the past, always looking back to move forward, and vice versa,” Ford said.

Still, many people outside the Schomburg community remain unaware of the center’s existence — a concerning reality at a time when the Harlem neighborhood continues to gentrify around it and when the Trump administration is actively working to restrict the kind of race-conscious education and initiatives embedded in the center’s mission.

Novella Ford associate director of public programs and exhibitions (left) and Subha Ahmed, poet and one of the lead instructors of the junior scholars (right) inside the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York on Saturday, June 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Jaylen Green)

“We amplify scholars of color,” Ford said. “It’s about reawakening. It gives us the tools and the voice to push back by affirming the beauty, complexity, and presence of Black identity.”

Founder’s donation seeds center’s legacy

The Schomburg Center has 11 million items in one of the oldest and largest collections of materials documenting the history and culture of people of African descent. That is a credit to founder Arturo Schomburg, an Afro-Latino historian born to a German father and African mother in Santurce, Puerto Rico. He was inspired to collect materials on Afro-Latin Americans and African American culture after a teacher told him that Black people lacked major figures and a noteworthy history.

Schomburg moved to New York in 1891 and, during the height of the Harlem Renaissance in 1926, sold his collection of approximately 4,000 books and pamphlets to the New York Public Library. Selections from Schomburg’s personal holdings, known as the seed library, are part of the centennial exhibition.

Ernestine Rose, who was the head librarian at the 135th Street branch, and Catherine Latimer, the New York Public Library’s first Black librarian, built on Schomburg’s donation by documenting Black culture to reflect the neighborhoods around the library.

Today, the library serves as a research archive of art, artifacts, manuscripts, rare books, photos, moving images and recorded sound. Over the years, it has grown in size, from a reading room on the third floor to three buildings that include a small theater and an auditorium for public programs, performances and movie screenings.

Aysha Schomburg, the great-granddaughter of the center’s founder, said she understands why many people still don’t know about the library. When her parents first met, her mother had no idea what was behind the walls of the Schomburg Center, even being from Harlem herself.

Brooklyn United Marching Band kicks in the Langston Hughes Auditorium celebrating the centennial of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York on Saturday, June 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Jaylen Green)

“This is with every generation,” Schomburg told The Associated Press while out at the festival on Saturday. “We have to make sure we’re intentional about inviting people in. So even the centennial festival, we’re bringing the Schomburg out literally into the street, into the community and saying, ‘here we are.’ ”

Youth scholars seen as key to center’s future

For years, the Schomburg aimed to uplift New York’s Black community through its Junior Scholars Program, a tuition-free program that awards dozens of youth from 6th through 12th grade. The scholars gain access to the center’s repository and use it to create a multimedia showcase reflecting the richness, achievements, and struggles of today’s Black experience.

It’s a lesser-known aspect of the Schomburg Center’s legacy. That’s in part because some in the Harlem community felt a divide between the institution and the neighborhood it purports to serve, said Damond Haynes, a former coordinator of interpretive programs at the center, who also worked with the Junior Scholars Program. But Harlem has changed since Haynes started working for the program about two decades ago.

Brooklyn United Marching Band performs in the Langston Hughes Auditorium celebrating the centennial of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, on Saturday, June 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Jaylen Green)

“The Schomburg was like a castle,” Haynes said. “It was like a church, you know what I mean? Only the members go in. You admire the building.”

For those who are exposed to the center’s collections, the impact on their sense of self is undeniable, Haynes said. Kids are learning about themselves like Black history scholars, and it’s like many families are passing the torch in a right of passage, he said.

“A lot of the teens, the avenues that they pick during the program, media, dance, poetry, visual art, they end up going into those programs,” Haynes said. “A lot the teens actually find their identity within the program.”

A 19-year-old man was killed and his passenger received life-threatening injuries in a crash Saturday when two vehicles ran off the road in Eagan. The driver of the other vehicle was impaired by alcohol, according to the Minnesota State Patrol.

Authorities say Reed Robert Schultz of Savage was driving a 2021 Jeep Compass southbound on Minnesota 149.

A 20-year-old man from White Bear Lake was driving a 2007 Honda Accord in the same direction when both vehicles crossed into the northbound lanes of Minnesota 149 before the Minnesota 55 intersection. The Jeep crashed into a light pole at the intersection and the Honda landed in the southeast ditch.

Schultz was taken to Regions Hospital in St. Paul, where he died from his injuries, per the crash report.

His passenger, an 18-year-old man from Edina, suffered life-threatening injuries and is receiving treatment at Regions Hospital.

The crash report says the man from White Bear Lake was driving under the influence of alcohol. He received non-life-threatening injuries.

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By LAURIE KELLMAN

LONDON (AP) — The world may be rethinking the American dream.

For centuries, people in other countries saw the United States as place of welcome and opportunity. Now, President Donald Trump’s drive for mass deportations of migrants is riling the streets of Los Angeles, college campuses, even churches — and fueling a global rethinking about the virtues and promise of coming to America.

“The message coming from Washington is that you are not welcome in the United States,” said Edwin van Rest, CEO of Studyportals, which tracks real-time searches by international students considering studying in other countries. Student interest in studying in America has dropped to its lowest level since the COVID-19 pandemic, it found. ”The fact is, there are great opportunities elsewhere.”

There has long been a romanticized notion about immigration and America. The reality has always been different, with race and ethnicity playing undeniable roles in the tension over who can be an American. The U.S. still beckons to the “huddled masses” from the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. The strong economy has helped draw millions more every year, with the inflow driving the U.S. population over 340 million.

Early clues across industries — like tourism, trade, entertainment and education — suggest the American dream is fading for foreigners who have historically flooded to the U.S.

Polling by Pew Research Center from January through April found that opinions of the U.S. have worsened over the past year in 15 of the 24 countries it surveyed.

Trump and many of his supporters maintain that migrants in the country illegally threaten American safety, jobs and culture. But people in the country legally also have been caught in Trump’s dragnet. And that makes prospective visitors to the U.S., even as tourists, leery.

Trump’s global tariff war and his campaign against international students who have expressed pro-Palestinian sympathies stick especially stubbornly in the minds of people across American borders who for decades clamored to participate in the land of free speech and opportunity.

“The chances of something truly horrific happening are almost certainly tiny,” Duncan Greaves, 62, of Queensland, Australia, advised a Reddit user asking whether to risk a vacation to the land of barbeques, big sky country and July 4 fireworks. “Basically it’s like the Dirty Harry quote: ‘Do you feel lucky?’”

Trump has married two immigrants

For much of its history, America had encouraged immigration as the country sought intellectual and economic fuel to spur its growth.

But from the beginning, the United States has wrestled with the question of who is allowed to be an American. The new country was built on land brutally swiped from Native Americans. It was later populated by millions of enslaved Africans.

The American Civil War ignited in part over the same subject. The federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers for a decade. During World War II, the U.S. government incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese descent in 10 concentration camps. About two-thirds were U.S. citizens.

Still, the United States has always been a nation of immigrants, steered by the “American Creed” developed by Thomas Jefferson, which posits that the tenets of equality, hard work and freedom are inherently American.

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Everyone, after all, comes from somewhere — a fact underscored on-camera in the Oval Office this month when German Chancellor Friedrich Merz gave the president the framed birth certificate of Trump’s grandfather, also named Friedrich, who emigrated from Germany in 1885. He was one of millions of Germans who fled war and economic strife to move to the United States in the late 19th Century.

There’s a story there, too, that suggests the Trump family knows both the triumphs of immigration and the struggle and shame of being expelled.

After marrying and making a fortune in America, the elder Trump attained U.S. citizenship and tried return to Germany. He was expelled for failing to complete his military service — and wrote about the experience.

“Why should we be deported? This is very, very hard for a family,” Friedrich Trump wrote to Luitpold, prince regent of Bavaria in 1905, according to a translation in Harper’s magazine. “What will our fellow citizens think if honest subjects are faced with such a decree — not to mention the great material losses it would incur.”

Trump himself has married two immigrant women: the late Ivana Zelníčková Trump, of what’s now the Czech Republic, and his current wife, Melania Knauss Trump of Slovenia.

Coming to America

It’s hard to overstate the degree to which immigration has changed the face and culture of America — and divided it.

Immigration in 2024 drove U.S. population growth to its fastest rate in 23 years as the nation surpassed 340 million residents, the U.S. Census Bureau said in December. Almost 2.8 million more people immigrated to the United States last year than in 2023, partly because of a new method of counting that adds people who were admitted for humanitarian reasons. Net international migration accounted for 84% of the nation’s 3.3 million-person increase in the most recent data reported.

Immigration accounted for all of the growth in 16 states that otherwise would have lost population, according to the Brookings Institution.

But where some Americans see immigration largely as an influx of workers and brain power, Trump sees an “invasion,” a longstanding view.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has initiated an far-reaching campaign of immigration enforcement that has pushed the limits of executive power and clashed with federal judges trying to restrain him over his invocation of special powers to deport people, cancel visas and deposit deportees in third countries.

In his second term, unlike his first, he’s not retreating from some unpopular positions on immigration. Instead, the subject has emerged as Trump’s strongest issue in public polling, reflecting both his grip on the Republican base and a broader shift in public sentiment.

A June survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 46% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, which is nearly 10 percentage points higher than his approval rating on the economy and trade. The poll was conducted at the beginning of the Los Angeles protests and did not include questions about Trump’s military deployment to the city.

‘Shaken their confidence’

The U.S. is still viewed as an economic powerhouse, though people in more countries consider China to be the world’s top economy, according to the Pew poll, and it’s unclear whether Trump’s policies could cause a meaningful drain of international students and others who feel under siege in the United States.

Netherlands-based Studyportals, which analyzes the searches for international schools by millions of students worldwide, reported that weekly pageviews for degrees in the U.S, collapsed by half between Jan. 5 and the end of April. It predicted that if the trend continues, the demand for programs in the U.S. could plummet further, with U.S. programs losing ground to countries like the United Kingdom and Australia.

“International students and their families seek predictability and security when choosing which country to trust with their future,” said Fanta Aw, CEO of NAFSA, which represents international educators. “The U.S. government’s recent actions have naturally shaken their confidence in the United States.”

By LUIS ANDRES HENAO and AMELIA THOMSON-DEVEAUX

WASHINGTON (AP) — Just over a month after Pope Leo XIV became the first U.S.-born pontiff in the history of the Catholic Church, a new poll shows that American Catholics are feeling excited about their new religious leader.

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About two-thirds of American Catholics have a “very” or “somewhat” favorable view of Pope Leo, according to the new survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, while about 3 in 10 don’t know enough to have an opinion. Very few Catholics — less than 1 in 10 — view him unfavorably.

Among Americans overall, plenty of people are still making up their minds about Pope Leo. But among those who do have an opinion, feelings about the first U.S.-born pope are overwhelmingly positive. The survey found that 44% of U.S. adults have a “somewhat” or “very” favorable view of Pope Leo XIV. A similar percentage say they don’t know enough to have an opinion, and only about 1 in 10 see him unfavorably.

As he promises to work for unity in a polarized church, Americans with very different views about the future of the church are feeling optimistic about his pontificate. Terry Barber, a 50-year-old Catholic from Sacramento, California, hopes Leo will seek a “more progressive and modern church” that is more accepting of all.

“I’m optimistic. Certainly, the first pope from the United States is significant,” said Barber, who identifies as a Democrat. “Since he worked under the previous pope, I’m sure he has similar ideas, but certainly some that are original, of his own. I’m looking forward to seeing what, if any changes, come about under his leadership.”

Bipartisan appeal

About half of Democrats have a favorable view of the new pope, as do about 4 in 10 Republicans and independents. Republicans are a little more likely than Democrats to be reserving judgment. About half of Republicans say they don’t know enough to have an opinion about the pope, compared to about 4 in 10 Democrats.

Republicans, notably, are no more likely than Democrats to have an unfavorable opinion of the pope. About 1 in 10 in each group view Pope Leo unfavorably.

Victoria Becude, 38, a Catholic and Republican from Florida, said she’s excited about the first U.S.-born pope and hopes he can steer the country back to Catholic doctrine and make Americans proud.

“I’m rooting for him,” she said. “I hope that America can get back to faith, and I hope he can do that.”

Being a political liberal or conservative, of course, isn’t the same thing as identifying as a liberal or conservative Catholic. But the poll found no discernible partisan gap among Catholics on Pope Leo, and Catholics across the ideological spectrum have expressed hope that Leo will be able to heal some of the divisions that emerged during the pontificate of his predecessor, Pope Francis.

Pope Leo recently criticized the surge of nationalist political movements in the world as he prayed for reconciliation and dialogue — a message in line with his pledges to make the Catholic Church a symbol of peace.

Before becoming pope, Cardinal Robert Prevost presided over one of the most revolutionary reforms of Pope Francis’ pontificate by having women serve on the Vatican board that vets nominations for bishops. He also has said decisively that women cannot be ordained as priests.

Donald Hallstone, 72, a Catholic who lives in Oregon, said he expects that Leo will continue to promote women in governance positions “at a time when there’s a shortage of priests” and other leaders in the church.

“It’d be great to see women in those roles,” he said. “Women were not excluded in the first centuries.”

On the other hand, some right-wing U.S. Catholics hope Leo will focus on Catholic doctrinal opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion.

Becude, the Republican, said she’s against same-sex relationships because she believes that unions should be between a man and a woman, something that Pope Leo has reiterated. Even though she describes herself as “very conservative,” though, she’s in favor of reproductive rights even when church teaching opposes abortion.

“I don’t believe that they should stop women from having abortions,” she said. “We should have our own rights because you don’t know the circumstances behind the reason why a woman would want the abortion in the first place.”

Few have negative views — yet

There’s plenty of room for views to shift as Leo’s agenda as pope becomes clear.

Pope Leo XIV waves as he arrives for his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square at The Vatican, Wednesday, June 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

Not all Americans have formed an opinion of the new pope yet; particularly, members of other religious groups are more likely to be still making up their minds. About half of born-again Protestants, mainline Protestants, and adults with no religious affiliation don’t know enough to have an opinion about the pope, although relatively few — about 1 in 10 — in each group have an unfavorable view of him.

Older Americans — who are more likely to identify as Catholics — are also more likely than younger Americans to be fans of Leo’s. About half of Americans ages 60 and older have a favorable view of Pope Leo, compared to about 4 in 10 Americans under 30.

But even so, only about 1 in 10 U.S. adults under 30 have an unfavorable view of the pope right now.

Mercedes Drink, 31, is from the pope’s hometown of Chicago. She still hopes that women will become ordained under his pontificate.

“It’s cool; I like him because he brings something different,” said Drink, who lives in Minnesota and identifies as being part of the “religious nones” — atheists, agnostics, or nothing in particular.

“As a young woman, I hope that he can bring change … considering who he is, he brings something new to the table. I hope he opens the world’s eyes to modernizing the church, bringing more people in, having more diversity.”

Henao reported from Princeton, N.J.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

The AP-NORC poll of 1,158 adults was conducted June 5-9, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 4 percentage points.