Black Bookstores Will By no means Die

When the Metropolis of San Francisco inducted Marcus Books into its famed preservation registry, Dr. Jasmine Johnson thought-about it much less of a historic marker than a historic erasure.

“All these historic landmarks are tombstones. It’s the one method for the town to reconcile with itself,” laments Jasmine, granddaughter of Marcus Books’ founders, Julian and Raye Richardson. “It’s shameful, or not even shameful, however a humiliation — the historical past of Black and Brown out. All these signposts present all of the methods Black people are ghosts within the metropolis.”

Jasmine’s damage flows from the hypocrisy. Simply as many different cities honor Black individuals as they take away them, San Francisco honored Marcus Books, the identical yr the household was pressured off the property. The reducing irony estranged Jasmine from her previous Fillmore neighborhood, which she now describes as “gross,” and from San Francisco, which she now describes as “a deeply stunning and deeply inhospitable place.”

Jasmine says she has solely been again to the previous website of Marcus Books as soon as, accidentally.

“The constructing — the Victorian —that the shop was in, there’s like massive Victorian steps that exit. And each Fourth of July weekend was a jazz competition. These stairs was stuffed, and my mother would have her personal… she’d simply create her personal band. Like, neglect the formal competition schedule. She would simply have the parents locally who had been musicians carry out proper there in entrance of the bookstore. It was the spot to be. There would all the time be individuals crowded on these steps. My sisters and I’d play on these steps with mates.

Katie Mitchell’s new ebook, “Prose to the Individuals: A Celebration of Black Bookstores.” (Cowl picture courtesy Clarkson Potter)

“And that point, I drove by… the individuals who had purchased the home had put a gate on the steps, and I simply thought it was simply so deeply antithetical to the earlier lives of that home.”

It was, in a phrase, gross.

Earlier than the gross gate, earlier than the tombstone of a historic marker, earlier than the flood of gentrification, buyouts, and evictions, Marcus Books brimmed as an epicenter of Black cultural life.

Or as the town would observe in its swan tune Landmark Designation Report, Marcus Books’ San Fransisco location was “a middle for Black intellectualism and concept alternate,” “a group centerpiece for Black San Franciscans,” “an area of Black group collectivity, empowerment, and motion,” and “a haven the place Black individuals ‘didn’t must apologize for his or her distinction, their mind, or their ache from racism.’”

Based initially by the Richardsons as Success Printing in 1946, the bookstore started in 1960. “I started ordering so many Black books for Raye and myself, and for mates, that I needed to rent a clerk. Earlier than I knew it, the entrance of the printing ship had been remodeled into the Success Bookstore,” Julian Richardson defined in 1975.

The couple modified the shop’s title to Marcus Books in 1964 after Marcus Garvey. Marcus Books is credited because the longest repeatedly working Black bookstore in the USA. All through its tenure, the shop has been family-owned, and is now run by Julian and Raye’s daughter Blanche Richardson and granddaughter, Cherysse Calhoun. Their son Billy runs the print store within the again. Julian and Raye’s daughter and Karen daughter Tamiko and husband Greg ran the Marcus Books San Francisco location earlier than it closed.

Jasmine remembers rising up “fairly actually within the bookstore,” enveloped in a hovering symphony of Black discourse. As her grandfather advised author Gene Ulansky within the mid-Seventies, “I’d somewhat rap about Black roots and uprootedness than promote you a ebook.”

“Conversations about Black people, Black historical past, Black politics, Black wellness, Black maternity was form of all people’s enterprise, and all people’s voice was invited into that dialog, simply by means of moving into the door” Jasmine reminisces. “It was a sure form of magic.”

A Black mom and baby studying at Marcus Books. (Photograph courtesy Clarkson Potter)

A part of the magic flowed from interacting with the stream of famend artists, activists, and authors gracing the shop. Jasmine recollects Harry Belafonte (“actually profound”), Rosa Parks (“simply energy, this like historic determine embodied”), Toni Morrison (“gorgeous – she’s my favourite”), B.B. King (“my mother was freaking out”) and so many extra.

The intoxicating mixture of the on a regular basis and the extraordinary explains why locals fought so arduous to save lots of Marcus Books, and why the lack of the San Francisco location resounded with such ache for all those that relied on the bookshop as a house and a haven.

In so some ways, Marcus Books’ story is Black San Francisco’s story is Black city Americas’ story. It’s a story that scholar and poet Eve Ewing describes as “a sample of Black post-industrialized cities which have giant populations of Black people who find themselves hanging on because the cities proceed to be remade and developed in methods that aren’t for us.”

As Ewing explains, “These cities are remodeling themselves into the brand new iteration of what they wish to be within the twenty first century, [and] the presence of poor Black individuals is inconvenient for that plan.”

these thought-about “inconvenient” in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Washington D.C., in San Francisco, one can’t assist however surprise what is going to occur to all the vibrancy that the Black communities have in-built these locales over all these many years.

One can’t assist however ask what James Baldwin requested, peering out at all the hostility that the world geared toward his Harlem: “What’s going to occur to all that magnificence?”

The place would all of that music, all of that discourse, all of that artwork, all of these colleges, church buildings, and bookstores go?

The query of displacement stays a thorny one for a individuals as nomadic as Black People who, through the Nice Migration, fled from Georgia to New York, from Mississippi to Chicago, from Louisiana to the California coast, and who now within the age of gentrification, are fleeing as soon as extra.

In so some ways, that query, that central query of displacement, of elimination, of a want for house, swirls on the very coronary heart of the story of Marcus Books’ namesake Marcus Garvey, who, in an effort to protect the Black thoughts, the Black physique, the Black society, proposed returning us all the way in which again to the motherland.

Embedded deep in Garvey’s daring declarations, in his phrases and deeds, in his insistence on Black pageantry, was the elevation of Black magnificence. In Garveyites’ summoning of big Black parades, the bustling Black band and choirs, the dressing of Black officers in full regalia—one might see a solution to Baldwin’s issues about the place would Black magnificence go.

It might go together with us. Our Blackness casts magnificence like a shadow, and it follows us from the South to the cities, from the cities to the suburbs, from the suburbs to wherever we would go.

Black magnificence definitely adopted Marcus Books, when it consolidated operations to its second location in Oakland, the place the shop’s legacy and works lives on, unfolding each in previous and current tense. That is what Jasmine describes as Marcus’s “ongoingness,” the truth that the shop is “a museum in a way however it’s a dwelling one — that’s nonetheless creating issues.”

Behind the bricks of its stunning facade that includes Black books and authors of yesteryear, the shop continues to be a hub of group, creating unchoreographed dialog, areas to debate, areas to convene, areas to iterate on Black political thought, areas, as Jasmine sees them, to honor the “deep regard for the rigor of Black literacy and Black mind.”

Standing in that retailer, it turns into evident that the great thing about Marcus is greater than an artifact, greater than a historical past. It’s proper now nonetheless right here.

Reprinted with permission from Prose to the Individuals: A Celebration of Black Bookstores by Katie Mitchell. Copyright © 2025 by Katherine Anne Mitchell. Pictures, except in any other case famous, copyright © 2025 by Julien James. Printed by Clarkson Potter, an imprint of Penguin Random Home.