Clarkson Potter
It was back in 2017 that I finally visited the legendary Eso Won Books of Los Angeles, California. The late Washington, D.C., poet Peter J. Harris, who had been living and writing for decades in Los Angeles, was my tour guide that day as I finally arrived at one of the crown jewel Black bookstores in the United States and took in what made the store so coveted, not just by the Black Los Angeles community, but also by Black people all over the world.
Katie Mitchell’s Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores recounts the story of Eso Won Books and many other Black bookstores. It is part coffee table photography book, part historical testimony via Mitchell and many other voices collected by her. It is the past, present, and future of Black bookstores that speaks to Black survival in a country now administered by a rogue government reeking of America’s most racist days.
Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores
By Katie Mitchell
Clarkson Potter, 240 pages
Publication date: April 8, 2025
At the very beginning, Mitchell, herself a bookseller, describes the “Black Bookshop” overall as “this remarkable institution.” Mitchell also writes that “Black protests feed Black bookshops like rivers do their banks,” and this theme rides high throughout the pages, photos, writings, and news clippings. This theme is certainly true of one of the most famous, though short-lived, bookstores in Washington, D.C., known as Drum and Spear Bookstore.
Drum and Spear Bookstore was founded in the days after the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. It was June 1, 1968, and young activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) knew such places were necessary. Years ago, in an interview I conducted with members of the SNCC who founded the store, I was told that there was still tear gas in the air when the bookstore was opening amid the aftermath of the riots in the city that followed on the evening of King’s murder.
“Drum and Spear Bookstore’s unique ability to unite Black people across class and political leanings eventually was noticed by the FBI,” Mitchell writes. The FBI labeled the store an “extremist Black bookstore” and began hard surveillance.
Mitchell also writes about D. Ruggles Books, a Black bookshop founded by abolitionist David Ruggles, who opened the store in 1834 in New York City, as the very first Black-owned bookstore in the United States. One year later, according to Mitchell, his store was “burned to ashes in a suspected act of arson.”
Clarkson Potter
Lewis Michaux’s National Memorial African Bookstore of Harlem, which is perhaps the gold standard for Black bookselling, also gets the spotlight by Mitchell, and it is no surprise. A sojourn to Michaux’s store for young readers and writers was as holy as the Hajj in Black literary circles. Michaux’s store in Harlem was a favorite of Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown, and Stokely Carmichael among many other Black activists. Michaux, according to Mitchell, was an “institution.”
Mitchell’s colorful book is so full of historical photos, short essays, poetry, and pictured artifacts of Black bookshop history, it could have easily been twice as long. The book is organized by region, which feels appropriate. The chapter called “DMV” covers the Washington, D.C., metro area and Baltimore, Maryland. There are chapters on “The Northeast,” “The South,” “The Midwest,” and “The West.” Each section dives deep into Black bookstore folklore with stories about shops like the Reverend Albert Cleage’s Shrine of the Black Madonna in Atlanta, Georgia. This store’s story is revealed through an interview with Cleage’s daughter, the writer Pearl Cleage.
It is no surprise that Mitchell includes a healthy focus on Black bookstores that specialize in Black women writers and those owned and operated by Black women. Across the geographical regions and chapters, Black women are answering the call of resistance and survival.
Prose to the People also comes as attention toward the history and importance of Black bookstores intensifies. NBC News reporter Char Adams’s Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore will arrive this November and expands upon Mitchell’s statement here. Black-Owned is described by the publisher, Tiny Reparations Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, as a book that “celebrates” Black bookstores and their role in community building—and in liberation—and “how Black bookstores have always been centerpieces of resistance.” Both of these offerings on literary culture come at a time when resistance to racism, sexism, and other societal ills remain front and center.