A Deep Dive into the Rich History of Black Bookstores

Char Adams is a journalist and former NBC news reporter. In February 2020 she published an article titled, “Black-Owned Bookstores Have Always Been at the Center of the Resistance.” In the process of doing the research for this article, she not only interviewed many Black booksellers but also found that relevant information was in many disparate places. There was no central archive, no sole, specialized place, to access this history, and this is the story of how this book came to be.

The history of the Black bookstore in the United States reaches further back into history than many of us realize, and Adams begins with the story of a man very few have heard of: David Ruggles. With this, the author also anchors readers in understanding that since the very genesis of the Black bookstore, it has been central to Black resistance movements since the 1830s. To remind you of context, this is prior to emancipation when it was illegal in some places for enslaved Black people to even learn how to read.

Adams explores Black bookstores chronologically and the majority of focus is during the 1960s, 1990s, and 2020s—times where Black bookstores had their impacts in civil rights movements front and center. There hasn’t been a solid accounting of the number of Black bookstores in the U.S. and not every single Black bookstore is named in this book. Some get more focus than others because of their roles in certain events and the book not only includes an extensive bibliography but also a list of Black bookstores that are still open, categorized by state.