Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore

Name: Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore
Author: Char Adams
ISBN: 9780593474235

Char Adams

awards won

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Char Adams

awards won

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#2851 of 3,809 books · #920 in History

Shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History (2025).

Black-Owned won the ABA Indies Choice Book Awards and the Black Caucus American Library Association Nonfiction Award, and was an L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist. Longtime NBC News reporter Char Adams writes a deeply compelling and rigorously reported history of Black political movements told through the lens of Black-owned bookstores, which have been centers for organizing from abolition to the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter. In Black-Owned, Char Adams celebrates the living history of Black bookstores. Packed with stories of activism, espionage, violence, community, and perseverance, Black-Owned starts with the first Black-owned bookstore, which an abolitionist opened in New York in 1834, and after the bookshop's violent demise, Black book-lovers carried on its cause. In the twentieth century, civil rights and Black Power activists started a Black bookstore boom nationwide. Malcolm X gave speeches in front of the National Memorial African Book Store in Harlem—a place dubbed "Speakers' Corner"—and later, Black bookstores became targets of FBI agents, police, and racist vigilantes. Still, stores continued to fuel Black political movements. Amid these struggles, bookshops were also places of celebration: Eartha Kitt and Langston Hughes held autograph parties at their local Black-owned bookstores. Maya Angelou became the face of National Black Bookstore Week. And today a new generation of Black activists is joining the radical bookstore tradition, with rapper Noname opening her Radical Hood Library in Los Angeles and several stores making national headlines when they were overwhelmed with demand in the Black Lives Matter era. As Adams makes clear, in an time of increasing repression, Black bookstores are needed now more than ever. Full of vibrant characters and written with cinematic flair, Black-Owned is an enlightening story of community, resistance, and joy.

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