BLACK-OWNED

A history of Black bookstores as loci of activism, community-building, and education.

Of the “third places” in social life, Black communities have famously formed around barbershops and beauty salons, churches, and civic organizations. Overlooked has been the role of Black-owned bookstores, which, as journalist-turned-author Adams has it, “have always been at the center of the resistance.” Adams begins, in that vein, with David Ruggles, whose Manhattan storefront sold pamphlets and books recounting the evils of slavery and espousing the abolitionist cause—and Ruggles himself, two years after he founded his bookstore in 1834, “had developed a reputation as a charismatic abolitionist who could inspire almost any crowd to action.” Ruggles turned his store into a place where Black people could “gather, read, and learn—all acts that were still largely forbidden in many parts of the country and, therefore, inherently radical.” Not surprisingly, Ruggles’ home soon became a stop on the Underground Railroad, helping some 300 enslaved people to escape to freedom—one of them, significantly, Frederick Douglass. Adams’ next subject is a young man named Lewis Michaux, who sold books from a cart before opening his National Memorial African Book Store in Harlem in 1933. It became a pioneering center for the early Black Nationalist movement. Taking her story into the militant era of the 1960s and ’70s, Adams profiles bookstore owners such as Charlie Cobb, whose Drum and Spear bookshop was a gathering point for activists in Washington, and who, among other things, paid special attention to books for young readers, an impetus for many other bookstores of that time and to this day. Black-owned bookstores—Adams reckons there are about 130 today—face challenges ranging from gentrification and discriminatory financing to competition from online vendors. But, Adams writes, this reflects the Black American condition in general, “pushing through adversity, holding on to values, and bending without breaking.”

An enlightening history for students of the Black experience and readers of books about books.