Liberation Through Literacy: Black Booksellers as the Forgotten Activists of the Black Power Movement

• In Event: Couriers of Justice: Print and Radio Activists and Social Change

Abstract

Drawing on a series of oral histories I conducted as part of the NEH-supported Media and the Movement project of the Southern Oral History Program, this paper focuses on Black-Power activists who founded scores of bookstores throughout the country in the 1960s and ‘70s, hoping to prompt both a “revolution of the mind” and a transformation of business culture in black communities. In this paper, I will trace how these activists embraced bookstores as information centers for educating readers about the global struggle for black liberation. Although they were businesses, interviewees describe these stores rather as public spaces for political education and radicalization, in turn raising important question about how activists remember political activities that are not easily classified as traditional protests or organizing campaigns.

Although these political entrepreneurs emerged from a long history of black enterprise, they were sharply critical of what they called the “black bourgeois” business tradition. Black Power activists viewed large parts of African American business culture as exploitative and detrimental to black pride. They castigated what they deemed an impulse to downplay or renounce black identity, as seen in such products as hair straighteners and skin bleaches. By contrast, black booksellers and the Black Power movement more generally embraced an alternative black business and consumer culture that affirmed racial pride, identified with Africa, and celebrated black identity.

Author

• Joshua Clark Davis, University of Baltimore