What to read this Black History Month: 5 Black-owned bookstore owners share their recommendations

The country’s first Black-owned bookstore was established nearly 200 years ago in Manhattan and served as a space for African Americans who were denied access to the city’s public libraries.

It was founded at 1 Cortlandt St. in 1834 by David Ruggles, a Black abolitionist, writer and publisher who played a lead role in the early network that would become the Underground Railroad. According to the David Ruggles Center for History and Education, the bookstore advertised and sold anti-slavery publications until a mob destroyed it.

Today, many Black-owned bookstores continue a tradition of being more than just purveyors of books.

This Black History Month, WNYC’s Community Partnerships Desk visited five Black-owned bookstores in the New York metro area and asked owners to share what inspired them to open their bookstores as well as their recommendations for essential reads. They also discussed how they worked to create spaces that advocate for diverse education, literacy and building community.

These conversations have been lightly edited for clarity and content.

Grandma’s Place

Dawn Harris Martine opened Grandma’s Place in Harlem in 1999 while she was still working as a New York City schoolteacher. She said she saw value in opening a space in her neighborhood that engaged residents in literacy and education.

How did you start?

Dawn: There was a vacant building right next door to my house and I did not want a laundromat or restaurant in there. So, I thought “what did this community need?” and I said, “it needed a literacy center” to teach parents and children to read.

I was going to name it the Kindred Literacy Center and my 7-year-old granddaughter said, “No grandma, it’s your place. It should be named Grandma’s Place.”

Initially, it was a literacy center. That’s all it was, because I was working as a New York City schoolteacher at the time, and I could only open at 3 o’clock when I came home from work. But after five years, they went up on the rent and I decided that I would use the 25,000 volumes of books that I had at my house and open a bookstore. I got some people, but I didn’t get a lot of them. Then I started putting educational toys and games out along with the books and that took off.

What kinds of books do you stock your shelves with?

As a child, there were no Black-positive books to read. I was reading “Fun with Dick and Jane” and “The Three Little Pigs” or whatever, but never saw a positive Black child. The books that I curate and put in the store are positive books of kids overcoming great obstacles and making a name for themselves and living successful lives.

What two books do you recommend?

“Some Soul to Keep” by J. California Cooper. She’s one of my favorite authors because she keeps it real and she makes you understand that you don’t have to start off with a great childhood, that you could have a horrible experience growing up, but that you can overcome it, and you can achieve great things and be happy.

The one book that I suggest that our parents get for their children is “Make Your Own Money: How Kids Can Earn It, Save It, Spend It, and Dream Big” by Ty Allan Jackson because it’s written in a language that the children would understand with illustrations and explains all the simplest concepts about how to use credit and not have credit use you and how to earn your own money and save it and keep it and also how to invest it and give it away.

Edokia Bookstore

Francois Nana Wilson was born in Ghana and raised in the Bronx. He opened Edokia Bookstore and Cafe in Mott Haven three years ago, after starting his own publishing company in 2011. Wilson said he created Edokia as a way to give back and inspire those within his community.

How did you start?

Francois: I wanted to change the narrative of how stories are being told, especially with minorities. We didn’t see a lot of representation of minorities in the stories. And that’s why I started my own publishing company. But we found it very difficult getting the publications into bookstores because of maybe the characterizations of how they looked. The rise of digital publishing has brought about more books and content, but we realized that many readers still discover books through physical interactions with them. And I said that if I’m able to, I would definitely want to open a bookstore, and God being good, I was able to open a bookstore and get the stories out.

What is the mission behind Edokia Bookstore?

I grew up in the Bronx, and I wanted to give back. If there’s anything I could give back, I think growth in literacy would definitely help the community and spur education.

The mission of Edokia was creating a bookstore that would foster a community by offering different products and different events. It wasn’t necessarily just to have a bookstore. So we have movie nights, open mic nights and poetry nights as well. We also have financial literacy classes.

What two books are among your must reads?

I would recommend “Sweet Rosa” by Kingsley Osei. Osei wanted to highlight and make it learnable for younger children to understand, make that message of fighting for equality relatable to those who are younger.

It’s a wonderful illustrator book and I think anyone who picks it up will understand the history behind it. Also, the characterization behind it and the book actually comes alive.

Another book which I published about seven years ago and recommend, is called “Blood Words: A Warrior’s Walk” by NYU professor Manoshi Chitra Neogy.

It’s a story about a woman of the elements who faces the decision of choosing her own path or staying in the traditional pathway that has been designed for her to follow. I don’t want to give too much away with a lot of great characterizations within the story, and it shows how she navigates her world, meaning the life that she left versus the life of adventure that she’s living now.

BEM books & more

BEM books & more is an online and pop-up bookstore created by sisters Danielle and Gabrielle Davenport in January 2021. The sisters describe BEM — which takes its name from the initials of their grandmothers, Bernice Mumford and Marjorie Davenport — as dedicated to “food literature of the African diaspora across genres.”

The Davenport sisters are hoping to open a brick-and-mortar store in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn this year.

What’s the story behind BEM books & more?

Gabrielle: When we started thinking about what it would look like to open a business together we went through a couple of ideas before landing on, “Oh wait, you know what we haven’t seen yet? A wonderful indie bookstore that’s really dedicated to Black food.”

Danielle: It’s so interesting to think about the way food stories show up throughout history, especially in Black History Month, to think about the food stories that are really central but also some of the smaller moments.

What else inspired you to create BEM?

Gabrielle: We were inspired by a lifelong love of indie bookstores and a deep connection to food and literature through our family. We spent a lot of time in the kitchen with our mom and aunts and family members in general.

Danielle: Our maternal grandmother Bernice passed when I was 1 [year old] and before Gabrielle was born, and our paternal grandmother passed away a few years ago now. So we don’t have either of them still with us. So, it sort of is that much more exciting and meaningful that we’re able to carry something on in their spirits and sort of inspired by them.

What two books do you each recommend?

Danielle: If I were to say sort of musts of the Black culinary tradition, two that I would throw out would be “Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora” by Bryant Terry. He edited it, but the contributors are so many folks who are doing brilliant work in the world of Black food.

Another sort of anthology in that vein is Klancy Miller’s “For the Culture: Phenomenal Black Women and Femmes in Food,” which specifically focuses on Black women and femmes in the world of food and beverage.

They’re both great sort of coffee table books slash cookbooks, and sort of the narratives, the essays, the writing that accompanies the recipes themselves, which is such a key part of every cookbook.

Gabrielle: One I would say is “Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking” by Toni Tipton-Martin.

Toni Tipton-Martin is an editor, historian [and] writer, and has really been sort of one of the titans of Black food writing.

The other one, that we actually just had an event for, is called, “Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks” by Crystal Wilkinson, who was the former Kentucky poet laureate, and is also starting her own imprint with the University of Kentucky Press, which is really exciting.

“Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts” is a culinary memoir. It talks a lot about Black Appalachian culinary heritage, and really about the kitchen ghosts, her ancestors who visit her when she is making food to feed herself and her family, and it’s just such a rich offering.

Adanne Bookstore

Owner Darlene Okpo opened Adanne Bookstore in 2021 in Dumbo, Brooklyn. The shop has since moved to a new location in Bed-Stuy. Okpo said she became passionate about promoting literacy and education around African American history.

When did you start Adanne?

Darlene: I opened the shop during COVID — May 2021 to be exact. It came at a point in my life where I knew that promoting literacy in America was very important because I was an [English Language Arts] teacher, and I taught in schools for five years as a full-time teacher, and just knowing and seeing how much my kids loved to read, but they wanted to read books with characters that looked like them, characters of color.

What else influenced you to start?

Going to Lehman College and studying African American studies, I felt as a youth I was robbed of my education because we didn’t learn about African American history often in school. I wanted people to experience the knowledge that I was able to experience [through college.]

And most of the times when I would go into bookstores in my neighborhood, especially the big box chain ones, it was hard to find books by authors of color.

What two books do you recommend?

My all-time favorite book — I always recommend it, it’s my No. 1 bestseller — is “All About Love: New Visions” by bell hooks. Reading that book healed my inner child in ways that I didn’t even think it could be.

She talks about love when it comes to friendship, love when it comes to yourself, love when it comes to family, love when it comes to your coworkers. So, I was just like, wow, this book is amazing.

Then I have another book called, “Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America” by Michael Harriot.

I recommend it to everybody because he writes in a way where it’s entertaining. You know when you read a history book and then you fall asleep by like the second page? This book is not that. It’s so entertaining when it comes to talking about history. I’m like, how can someone write a book about something so serious, but it’s still entertaining, where it’s just like, tell me more, tell me more. And I just love how he approaches that storytelling, because I learned so much from that book.

Source of Knowledge

Masani Barnwell George, along with her husband, Dexter George and Patrice McKinney own Source of Knowledge, a bookstore located in Newark, New Jersey. She said it’s been serving the Newark community for more than 3 decades to “let people of color know that you are also seen on pages.”

How did the bookstore come about?

Masani: It started out as a family business in Manhattan, on the streets, selling books and cards, with my husband’s family, that’s where they began and my husband decided to bring it over to Jersey.

Why is a space like this important in Newark?

Because there’s not many venues for the books that we specialize in. You don’t see books with children of color on them displayed in many bookshops. And if they are displayed, it’s very few, so you’d think there were none. So, at Source of Knowledge that’s our purpose: to make everyone aware, and let people of color know that you are also seen on pages, and our children are seen.

The importance of this bookstore in Newark is because there’s always so much negativity that you hear about the city. Over the years, it has been changing and growing, but we need to see that we are a part of this world change, that we have a place to get away from all the chaos in the world, and see further.

Two book recommendations?

There’s a book by Carter G. Woodson called “The Mis-Education of the Negro.” I think that’s an essential book, especially when you want to learn the truth about where things started and how to take things to the next level and change your thinking.

Another book I think everybody should read, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley,” because you don’t know Malcolm until you’ve read that book by Alex Haley, which is amazing.