Harare Review of Books

240 pp. Published April 8, 2025 by Clarkson Potter. Non-fiction.

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Books are magic, and bookstores are where you go (in a capitalistic world) to find that magic (when you don’t go to a library). But as Prose to the People shows, in the Black community in the US, bookstores have also served as a place to gather, learn, mobilise, debate, protest, find support and healing, gather in fellowship, socialise, and much much more. They are repositories of Black history; so is this book.

Katie Mitchell has collected an amazing array of stories and photographs from across the US—from New York to LA, and from Detroit and Portland to Houston—and across time in this beautiful volume. Some of these stores are long gone and exist only in community memory and archives; others opened as recently as during the pandemic.

“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.”

Did you know about D. Ruggles Books, where Frederick Douglass was sheltered for a time? Or Harlem’s first Black bookstore, Young’s Book Exchange? Or National Memorial African Bookstore:

“Legend holds that [Lewis] Michaux decided to sell books after seeing some through a window display during his time as a window washer. He started small, with only a handful and a wagon to drag his inventory up and down Harlem’s streets during the beginning of the Great Depression.”

Included in this book are excellent essays by some wonderful writers, including Ytasha L. Womack, Michael A. Gonzalez, Joshua Clark Davis, Rio Cortez, Aaron Ross Coleman, Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, Kiese Laymon, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, and more.

What this book has stirred in me, a lover of both Afro- and Afrodiasporic history and also of books, is the desire to one day make a pilgrimage to as many of the sites mentioned as I can. If I can’t—and it would be the work of perhaps a lifetime to track down all of these places and memories—I’ll treat Prose to the People as a reference book of places to go if ever I’m in a particular area (and I have in fact already made a recommendation to a friend).

A phenomenal, well-researched and captivating resource, with the additional gift of something very special: a foreword from Nikki Giovanni.

Many thanks to Clarkson Potter and NetGalley for early access.

Affiliate link: Support independent bookshops and my writing by ordering it from Bookshop here.