Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore by Char Adams

 
Hello my lovely readers! I ate this book up! Let's get into it.

SYNOPSIS
Black-Owned celebrates small businesses and their role in community building—and in liberation. Journalist Char Adams reports on how Black bookstores have always been centerpieces of resistance. This is a story of activism, espionage, violence, and perseverance. The first Black-owned bookstore was opened by an abolitionist in 1834. In the twentieth century, civil rights and Black Power activists started a Black bookstore boom nationwide. Malcolm X would deliver speeches at the doorstep of the National Memorial African Book Store in Harlem, a place dubbed “Speakers Corner.” Soon many bookstores became targets of the FBI and local law enforcement alike.

Amid these struggles, bookshops were also places of 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. Now a new generation of Black activists are joining the radical bookstore tradition, with rapper Noname opening her Radical Hood Library in Los Angeles. And several stores made national headlines in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement. Today finds Black-owned bookshops in a position of strength—and as Adams will make clear, in an era of increasing division, their presence is needed now more than ever.

MY THOUGHTS
I LOVED THIS BOOK SO MUCH!

It is a celebration of Black bookstores, Black writers, Black publishers and Black American history. Joy simply flowed through my veins while reading this book. Adams did such a great job with her research and her writing and telling the story of Black-owned bookstores and their importance.

Also, I really loved that I knew every author, celebrity and movement that she mentioned in this book (way to be well-versed, Naomi!). I did learn about David Ruggles, whom I knew nothing about, but am excited to read his biography. And I really want to get my hands on what's believed to be the first Black romance book by a Black author Entwined Destinies by Rosalind Welles (aka Elsie B. Washington) but it seems like it's completely out of print even though it came out in 1980. Boo.

I'm immediately heading out to buy a physical copy of this book for my library. What a wonderful book.