Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore

NBC News reporter Char Adams offers a deeply compelling and rigorously reported history of Black political movements as told through the lens of the Black-owned bookstore, which have been centers for organizing movements from abolition to Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter.

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. 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 hit national headlines when they were overwhelmed with demand in the wake of the brutal death of George Floyd and the ensuing 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. Populated by vibrant characters, and written with cinematic flair, Black-Owned will be an enlightening story of community, resistance, and joy.

Story Locale:New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Oakland, Denver, Washington, D.C., Buffalo, Detroit, and more

About the Author

Char Adams is a reporter for NBC News, and former reporter for People, and her writing on race and identity has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, Oprah Daily, Vice, Teen Vogue, and Bustle. She hosted COVID University New York, one of the first podcasts to chronicle the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City. She is a proud Philadelphia native and now lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Author Residence: Dallas-Fort Worth

Author Hometown: Philadelphia