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RACISM
How a Black Book Store Owner’s Pride Collided With White Prejudice
Liberation Station, the first black-owned bookstore in Raleigh, North Carolina, will close after an ambush of racist threats
In America, only six percent of independently owned bookstores are black-owned, a disparity that exposes a legacy of systemic racism. Historically, state-wide anti-literacy laws once prohibited Black people from reading and writing. For instance, an 1829 Georgia law made it illegal for a “free Negro or slave to read or write.” The law was so absurd that “a father may be flogged for teaching his own child.” Until the mid-1860s, many state-wide laws deprived Black Americans of the opportunity to read, write, and teach. And while our nation has progressed, there’s still notable resistance to their intellectual liberty. Efforts to ban black history books and classes illustrate the systemic nature of their resistance. Indeed, the racism Black bookstore owners experience today can also be traced back to this tradition.
One only needs to examine the recent news to see why there are so few. Liberation Station, the first black-owned bookstore in Raleigh, North Carolina, recently announced it would be closing due to numerous death threats they received. When Victoria Scott-Miller, an author and well-known documentarian, opened the bookstore on Juneteenth last year, there was a celebratory response. As Scott-Miller noted in an interview with CBS, “when a child is able to learn the value of themselves through reading, we all benefit from that because they are going to go into the world and society confident with their contribution.” And yet, despite best efforts, the bookstore’s physical location is closing less than a year later, a direct result of racist threats.
Ideally, a bookstore would be treated as a positive social addition. And since only a select few are black-owned, there is undoubtedly a need for more to be built, maintained, and supported. However, the experience at the Liberty Station Bookstore’s closure shows the dangers of embarking on a path of social change. Other black-owned bookstores have faced racist threats and violence in the past. In September of 1835, an angry mob burned David Ruggles’ bookstore, enranged by…
