Atlanta native Katie Mitchell’s love of books runs deep. It’s apparent in her carefully curated selection of recent and vintage titles available for purchase at her Instagram store Good Books ATL, and it’s visible in her upcoming book, “Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores” (Clarkson Potter, $26.99).
In this survey of Black bookstores new and old, Mitchell notes the emergence of Black-owned bookstores that rose out of the Civil Rights Movement and served as important cultural hubs for artists, intellectuals and activists.
“Black bookshops — crafted in the shadows of slavery and segregation — created cathedrals for Black art, ideas, and resistance. They were our counter-publics. They were our brain trusts. They held our intellectual pasts, presents, and futures in a country denying our intellects, pasts, presence, and futures,” she writes in her introduction.
And she describes a similar blossoming of new bookstores in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. To chronicle the industry’s new era, while paying tribute to past, Mitchell spent two years touring the country’s Black bookstores — defined as those that specialize “in Black publications as opposed to (being) merely Black-owned.”
Presented in a visually dynamic, scrapbook-style format, the coffee table book supplements Mitchell’s experiential narratives and Q&As with booksellers with new and vintage photos, old documents, advertisements and flyers, plus poems and essays from other contributors. Among them are Kiese Laymon and Nikki Giovanni, who provides the foreword.
The bookstores are categorized by geographic location, with a special chapter devoted to the DMV — the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia.
Atlanta is well represented in the section on the South, naturally, starting with the Shrine of the Black Madonna. Established in the ‘70s by the Black nationalist Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church, it sought to blend activism with spiritualism. The section includes a Q&A with Atlanta author and playwright Pearl Cleage, whose father founded the West End church.
“The Shrine was a national meeting place for the exchange of ideas and strategies to support freedom struggles around the country and across the world,” says Cleage, who recalls hearing Stokely Carmichael, John O. Killens, Bill Worthy and Clifton DeBerry speak there. “Their energy and passionate dedication shaped my own view of my role as a Black writer.”
Also included is Atlanta’s newest Black bookstore, 44th and 3rd Booksellers. Co-owner Warren Lee gives Mitchell a tour of the West End space and explains the name: 44th refers to the 44th president, Barack Obama; 3rd “stands for life, literature and legacy.”
Apropos to its name, the store contains a whole section devoted to books related to the Obamas. There’s also a section containing vintage titles such as a bound copy of Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1969 poem “Riot.”
Rounding out Atlanta’s offerings is For Keeps Books on Auburn Avenue and the eclectic “bookhouse and carespace” Yes, Please Books in Scottdale.
Mitchell points out that the first event to occur in Yes, Please Books’ little pink house was the birth of a baby, which set the tone for this most unusual bookstore.
As my colleague Danielle Charbonneau recently reported in the AJC, the space serves many functions and has hosted gardening workshops, community dinners, yoga classes and acupuncture, in addition to book signings and poetry readings.
“It’s literally a house filled with books that you can borrow, lend or buy,” founder Lauren Jones tells Mitchell. “Some people come to write books or share books. It’s a space to practice care for each other.”
In her travels around the country, Mitchell, who holds degrees in public policy from Georgia Tech, was struck by the variety of approaches different bookstores take, focusing on everything from politics to feminism to science fiction. And she was surprised to discover a web of connectivity between booksellers.
“You can look at one bookstore and see, OK, this one bookstore owner interned for this other bookstore owner, and this bookstore owner was mentored by this one,” she said. “It’s kind of like a family tree in a way that I uncovered while doing this, and it stretches all across the country. … It’s really cool to see how that mentorship and family lineage traveled across the decades.”
The Georgia Center for the Book presents the launch of “Prose to the People” on April 8 at First Baptist Church of Decatur.
Suzanne Van Atten is a book critic and contributing editor to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She may be reached at Suzanne.VanAtten@ajc.com.
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