Bookselling While Black Latest Danger Occupation In North Carolina
Deep sigh.
The first Black-owned children’s bookstore in North Carolina will be shutting down this month after the owner received anonymous death threats aimed at the shop and her family. Victoria Scott-Miller and her family opened Liberation Station bookstore in downtown Raleigh just before Juneteenth last year, after selling kids’ books out of their car at pop-up events around the Raleigh-Durham area for several years.
When the store opened Scott-Miller told the local CBS affiliate that she and her husband got into the bookselling business after a disappointing search for books for their two sons at a big-box bookstore. The family had some particular criteria in mind for the books they’d sell at local events: They would offer “Black authors, illustrators and stories that weren’t based in trauma,” she said. Things went well enough that, with some help from a crowdfunding campaign, they were able to open the brick-and-mortar location last year. The grand opening included a book signing by 10 Black authors and illustrators and a rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by a local baritone.
But then starting last September, Scott-Miller wrote on Facebook (archived link),
we’ve faced numerous threats following the opening of our store. Some we brushed off, while others included disturbing phone calls detailing what our son Langston wore when he was at the shop alone.
Scott-Miller runs the shop with her husband and her oldest son, who’s 13. She told WRAL that after the threats began, they took a two-week break from the store “just to breathe and process that the thing we had created for good was now attempting to be destroyed and taken away from us in some way.”
Here’s WRAL’s video report on the store’s closing:
It looks like a terrific place for kids, but only if they aren’t being threatened, and here we are in 2024, when Mayoring While Black can make someone the target of racist conspiracy theories, as can Historying While Black, so Selling Books While Black apparently is, too.
Scott-Miller told WRAL, “Unfortunately, we live in a country that has given permission to the nameless and faceless people to make threats and cause harm, emotional harm.”
Unfortunately, that seems to be the platform of one of our major political parties.
She said that she’d been reluctant to say anything about the threats until she brought them up with the building landlord in January, because
“I didn’t want to become the face of another movement,” she said. “I didn’t want to become the face of another cause.
“I wanted to settle into this space with a peace that we all deserve.”
The video above notes that police don’t have a record of any calls regarding the threats, and they encourage anyone receiving threats to report them.
Scott-Miller said Liberation Station will close its doors April 13 and any unsold inventory will be donated to area literacy nonprofits, but that she also plans on bringing back the business in the future, after she and her family “go back to the drawing board to reassess and redefine what we will need in our next location.”
Perhaps she could try selling $60 Bibles as a sideline. If you want to help Liberation have less unsold inventory to deal with, here’s their website.
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please subscribe, or if a one-time donation is more your cup of tea, we will still drink coffee but respect your hot beverage choices.
My family left Raleigh 61 years ago, after a cross-burning in our driveway that my parents assumed was the Klan targeting them for their civil rights work. They sent me to private religious school because NC's "one drop rule" at the time meant I could be considered Black; they likely also had trepidations regarding my already obviously pugnacious personality.
Ever since I have hoped Raleigh would grow, learn, and evolve. This story, however, brings back memories of little Black kids shut out of the public pool. Six decades don't erase such images. Apparently they don't erase hate, either.
"we’ve faced numerous threats following the opening of our store. Some we brushed off, while others included disturbing phone calls detailing what our son Langston wore when he was at the shop alone."
It seems like not a lot has changed since the other Langston, some 100 years ago . . .
I, Too
BY LANGSTON HUGHES
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.