Prose to the People

Introduction

Black protests feed Black bookshops like rivers do their banks, like volcanoes do their valleys—through floods and fires, through eruptions and deluge, through burnings and drownings powerful enough to turn the barren and bleached, fertile and Black. For when our movements surge, when Black folks’ gurgling pain swells into the streets, that same pain flows through our pens. It turns our subjugation into our subjects, our pain into our prose. It turns life sentences into lyrical sentences. It turns everyday speech into extraordinary speeches. This creative cycle began churning sixty years ago—the Civil Rights Movement gave way to the Black Arts Movement, the flood of marches nourished the poets, the fire of rioters fertilized the novels, and our resistance fueled our renaissance.

In the late 1960s, Black bookstores emerged as cultural hubs of Black art and thought, as the incubators for Black aesthetics and Black Power, as the physical spaces where the modern artistic movements of slam poetry, spoken word, and hip-hop were first seeded. And today, just as the Black Art’s bookshops bloomed from the tumult of the Civil Rights era, a new generation of Black bookstores is blossoming amid the upheaval of the Movement for Black Lives.

For the past two years, I have traveled to Black bookstores across the United States gathering the accounts of shops old and new, talking with elders and upstarts, and collecting love letters, poems, histories, pictures, essays, and art from those whose stories unfold in these stores. What follows is a quilting of those narratives, interviews, and discussions revealing Black bookstores as a mosaic as diverse as the Black community, as institutions reflecting all of our character, joy, humor, tears, scars, and ideas in motion. All at once, Black bookstores are resilient and radical. They’re motley yet mingled. They’re all of our identities, refracted innumerable times, across millions of pages all across this nation.

Their history runs deep. Along with Black colleges and Black churches, Black bookstores have sustained us through unspeakable oppression. When libraries banned us, they were our catalogs; when museums barred us, they were our exhibitions; when archives forbade us, they cradled our histories. Black bookshops—crafted in the shadows of slavery and segregation—created cathedrals for Black art, ideas, and resistance. They were our counter-publics. They were our brain trusts. They held our intellectual pasts, presents, and futures in a country denying our intellects, pasts, presence, and futures. And today, in America—where teaching Black people to read was once illegal and where teaching many Black books still is—Black bookstores remain as vital as ever.

This book presents a wide sampling and a survey of this remarkable institution. However, the stories featured herein are more exemplary than exhaustive. A full accounting of all the nation’s Black bookstores is a project beyond this book’s scope. The profiles adhere to Rosemary M. Stevenson’s definition of a Black bookstore in Black Bookstores: A Cultural History, as one that “specializes in Black publications as opposed to [being] merely Black-owned.” This work stands on the shoulders of many scholars, scribes, and community historians, and would have been impossible without the aid of many friends, old and new. To all those who made this book possible, I’m eternally grateful, and to all those who are about to discover the extraordinary story of the Black bookstore, I am proud to present Prose to the People.