Black-Owned, the Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore by Char Adams
America’s first Black-owned bookstore belonged to a fervent abolitionist, David Ruggles. From the start, he encountered racial harassment that would plague Black bookstore owners through the next century and beyond.
The ordeal of Ruggles, who opened his shop in 1834 on Lispenard Street in lower Manhattan, is where journalist Char Adams begins her account of Black bookstores, Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore. Adams often reports on race; now she has given readers an important book about American history.
The little-known story of the bookstores encompasses activism, education, the imperatives of Black culture and identity, and pushback against government and corporate forces that sought to undermine the success of Black entrepreneurs.
During the nineteenth century, literacy among Black people was considered a threat to the institution of slavery and Jim Crow norms. Southern states, in particular, passed laws against Blacks gathering to read and write. Inevitably, Black bookstores became centers of teaching and learning. Customers who dropped in to buy books often found themselves radicalized. And many visitors came not to read, but to listen.
In Black-Owned, Char Adams meticulously describes the stores and their owners. She conjures the social context and brings the owners to life in all of their brilliance, frustration and resolve. After all, Black bookstore owners continually fended off challenges to their businesses.
Most insidious was the F.B.I., specifically director J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO operation, which aimed (in its own words) to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” organizations perceived as anti-government. In a famous 1968 memo, Hoover targeted Black bookstores.
Challenges
Gentrification, the proliferation of chain bookstores, the relatively few books written for Black children (same for adult fiction), and white book associations that stymied Black publishers also contributed to “a tiring pattern.” Adams writes, “repeated periods of downturn over the century made it clear that sometimes economic pressure can overpower cultural and even communal interests.”
More recently, book-banning movements have hurt libraries and all types of bookstores that offer works on racism, Black history and topics deemed “DEI.”
Yet during the past century, hundreds of Black bookstores flourished: too many to name. Among the best known were Hue-Man in Denver, Eso Wan in Los Angeles, Pyramid in Boynton Beach, Hakim’s in Philadelphia, Drum and Spear in D.C., the African National Memorial Bookstore and Liberation Bookstore in Harlem, Karibu in the Maryland suburbs and Vaughn’s Bookstore in Detroit.
Today, Ward estimates, the nation sustains more than 130 Black and Black-owned bookstores. She is painfully aware that sales tend to skyrocket on the heels of tragedy. Of the year 2020, she observes, “It wasn’t lost on booksellers that it took police officers and white vigilantes murdering Black people to usher the nation into a racial reckoning and people of all races into Black bookstores.”
One of the many intriguing revelations in Black-Owned is a list of “core books” — the top ten that Black booksellers consistently recommend. I’m naming the top five because they might lead readers farther into the world of Black literature.
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
- The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson
- The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
- 100 Years of Lynching by Ralph Ginzburg
- Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur
Onward.
About Char Adams:
Char Adams is a former reporter for NBC News and for People. Her writing on race and identity has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Oprah Daily, Vice, Teen Vogue, and Bustle. She is a proud Philadelphia native and now lives in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.
