Harare Review of Books

304 pp. November 4, 2025, Tiny Reparations Books. Non-fiction.

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Adams tells the long history of Black bookstores beginning with the first known one, that of activist abolitionist David Ruggles, opened in 1834 in New York City and always beset by trouble from racists. Ruggles made it a place where Black people gathered for community and education. He had a printing press, and produced pamphlets for distribution. His bookstore didn’t come out of nowhere, however: it had precedent in literary societies across the country (like Philadelphia’s Reading Room Society, from 1828) where Black people could access reading material and socialise around literature.

Ruggles’s bookstore—community- and activism-oriented—was emblematic of many prominent Black bookstores that came after: Carter’s Book Store (1908) in Mississippi, visited by Booker T. Washington; Young’s Book Exchange, which Adams calls “the first massively successful bookstore in the United States,” opened in 1915 in Harlem; and Lewis Michaux, a Black Nationalist and Garveyite, founded his National Memorial African Book Store in Harlem in 1933. Langston Hughes and Malcolm X were among the luminaries who gathered there, Malcolm X to speak to crowds outside.

Adams covers the rise and fall of Black bookstores by decade all over the US, expounding the pressures they were under that led to the closure of many. Most recently, Black bookstores were both a gathering point and flashpoint during the twin crises of Black Lives Matter and the COVID pandemic. Black bookstores recorded historic profits at that time, and this period was also the genesis of many new stores. Adams shows that the focus on community, education and activism has remained consistent even for these most modern stores: Black bookstores are never simply a place to buy books.

Black-Owned ends on a hopeful note for the future of Black bookstores and publishing, and with a list of these stores across the US.

Relevant reading:

• Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores x Katie Mitchell (also 2025) covers much of the same ground. It’s remarkable for its photographs.
• Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature x Dan Sinykin (DRC) provides some context for the environment Black bookstores have operated in.

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