These Black Bookstores Are Committed to the Fight for Freedom

We hear stories before we are born. Our mothers and our grandmothers sing to us; sometimes spirituals, sometimes jazz to keep our coming in rhythm with our ancestors. We are born and everyone who loves our family comes around to drink and eat and sing. We are happy.

By the time we begin our own dreams, we are given illustrated books that stoke our imaginations. Whether people give us books, money to buy books, or paper to draw on, we find ways to make up our own stories. Some of these stories are still with us. Others have been lost or destroyed by time or close-mindedness. But their essence lives on in memory, history, libraries and bookstores.

Libraries are the university of the people. I loved going into the wood-floored, green-lighted rooms where index cards awaited. There were so many worlds in those cards, and I could pick any one of them to venture into.

When I learned how to drive, I could go to the bookstore. I’d drive downtown, park and go in looking grown-up. I was always neat, and I always spoke to the owners. I got to know bookstore owners across America the same way I got to know my librarians.

I had an old clunker, but gas was less than a dollar a gallon, so I could drive from New York City to Detroit to Chicago to Denver to Portland and down the California coast, meeting bookstore owners along the way. Coming back home, I took the southern route: Houston, Dallas, St. Louis, New Orleans, Mississippi, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh.

There were Black bookstores on almost every corner, from Una Mulzac’s Liberation Bookstore and Lewis Michaux’s famous and necessary National Memorial African Bookstore in Harlem, to Vaughn’s Bookstore in Detroit. My goodness, did I leave out Washington, D.C.? Every Black community had a Black bookstore. And we had pride. We had poetry. We had song. We had readings. Nothing was more important than the bookstores, except perhaps the churches.

Most of the buildings have been taken but not forgotten. Marcus Books in Oakland still stands, as does Medu and the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Atlanta, and there are new bookstores opening across the country. The songs are still being sung.

Prose to the People reminds us that ​“Black is beautiful,” as Mr. Michaux liked to say, ​“but knowledge is power.”

—Nikki Giovanni

Over the last decade, a generation has been prodded by more and more senseless arrests, hung juries and live-streamed killings. The Radical Hood Library emerged from this reality.

The Library carries Noname Book Club​’s monthly picks, where book club members convene and converse about works such as Albert Woodfox’s Solitary and Derecka Purnell’s Becoming Abolitionists.

While the namesake of Noname Book Club and Radical Hood Library collective member Fatimah ​“Noname” Warner has graced Coachella’s stage and Vanity Fair​’s pages, her presence is also felt by society’s most marginalized — her incarcerated comrades. ​“Incarcerated people have disappeared from our communities, so I think no matter how much of an abolitionist you see yourself as, you become even more of an abolitionist when you have regular conversations with [incarcerated] people,” says Natalie Matos, the library’s program manager.

Since 2020, the prison program has sent books to incarcerated folks so they, too, can participate in the conversations happening on the outside and understand the systems that oppress them.

The Radical Hood Library expounds upon the Black literary tradition of Black bookstores past. Just as the National Memorial African Bookstore buoyed Malcolm X, Martin Sostre’s Afro-Asian Bookshop taught Buffalo the language of resistance, and Paul Coates’ The Black Book brought progressive Afrocentric literature to those behind bars, the Radical Hood Library centers the community — all of the community — in an ethic of liberation.

“They love our food, our music, our culture, but they hate us,” Vera Warren-Williams declares, her sweet, laid-back New Orleans drawl betraying the intensity of her words. ​“We have to be the guardians and gatekeepers of our culture.”

Now an elder, Ms. Vera has been a cultural guardian and gatekeeper since she was a 24-year-old substitute teacher in the Lower Ninth Ward. ​“There were no books reflective of Black kids in the school library or classroom, so I started bringing my personal books and I saw the impact on the kids,” she remembers. Such were Community Book Center’s organic beginnings.

“My intention was to have a museum,” Ms. Vera continues. She holds a master’s in museum studies from Southern University and curates Community Book Center as a gallery for proper representation and preservation of Black culture. ​“Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero,” she says, referencing the popular African proverb.

Being in business for over four decades, the store is a living artifact. The beloved neighborhood store was the only Black bookstore to survive Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After the levees broke, Community Book Center hosted a pancake breakfast. ​“The community is my biggest joy, ” says Mama Jennifer, Community Book Center’s manager since the late 1980s. ​“That’s why it’s important for us to have Black spaces so we can communicate what we gon’ do and what we did.”

Marc Lamont Hill is a professor, television host, author, bookstore owner and, perhaps most importantly, Uncle Bobbie’s nephew. Having grown up in West Philadelphia, Marc recalls seeing his Uncle Bobbie reading E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie. The book, which critiqued the Black middle class, lived among Uncle Bobbie’s extensive collection of Ebony and Jet magazines and rare first editions.

“Seeing him read that helped me think differently about what my goal should be in life,” Marc reflects years later. ​“I shouldn’t be out here, just thinking about getting a good job or getting a fancy degree. … I should be thinking more deeply about the class position of my people, actually thinking more deeply about what freedom and liberation might really look like.”

Just as Uncle Bobbie fashioned Marc’s education through books, Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books sculpts today’s youth, particularly those in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, where the store operates. ​“Part of the goal of the store is to be […] building strong boys, rather than repairing broken men,” Marc affirms. ​“Unfortunately, we live in a society that wages generation wars. We’re told anything that’s old is not worthwhile. We destroy our ancient landmarks and ignore the past and erase history. At the same time, we’re taught that young people are violent, dangerous, unserious, disengaged, and not worthy of taking on the mantle or carrying on the baton from us.”

But the bookstore — named for the intergenerational bond between its owner and his uncle — pries apart those misconceptions. ​“Creating spaces for intergenerational dialogue is so important. I wanted to create a space where we could deeply engage with one another with books — something so rooted in tradition — at the center.