Black-Owned

Black-Owned celebrates the history of Black bookstores and their role as centerpieces of resistance and liberation. Drawn from the author’s in-depth research and reporting, Black-Owned is a story of activism, espionage, violence, and perseverance. Char Adams details Black bookstores’ battles with racist vigilantes, local law enforcement, and federal agents as they fueled Black political movements throughout American history. This history begins with David Ruggles, the abolitionist who founded the country’s first Black-owned bookshop in New York in 1834, as well as the Black bibliophiles who carried the cause after the bookshop’s violent demise. In the twentieth century, a Black bookstore boom led to the rise of many hubs for Civil Rights and Black Power activism. Malcolm X and W.E.B. DuBois would deliver speeches at the doorstep of National Memorial African Bookstore in Harlem, a place soon dubbed “Speakers Corner.” Soon many bookstores in the 1960s became targets of the FBI and local law enforcement alike. Amid these struggles, bookshops were also places of celebration; Eartha Kitt and Langston Hughes held autograph parties at their local Black owned bookstore, and Maya Angelou even became the face of National Black Bookstore Week.