Indie bookstores double as social justice hubs
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The brick-and-mortar bookseller is no longer merely peddling pages alone.
Why it matters: Indie bookstores have become hubs for social justice movements and diverse communities — as the related activism that defined the 2010s has seen some of its key initiatives unravel.
- "As much as they're places to sell books, they're also really places to serve the people around them too," Rachel Gilman, The Feminist Press sales and marketing coordinator, told Axios. "They're social spaces as much as they are consumer spaces."
- Counterculture and indie bookstores across the country have provided food, menstrual products and contraceptives to community members, the New York Times reported. Mutual aid efforts have also sprung out of bookstores.
State of play: The missions of bookstores "radically changed" after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, said Gilman, who wrote a column about pandemic-era bookselling with independent bookstore owner interviews.
- In addition to re-thinking the business model, bookstore owners had to "take a pause and be like 'OK, what do the people around me want? What do they need? What is advantageous?'" she said.
The intrigue: Socially-minded bookstores "manage to persist, often for decades, between the spikes of public protests," Kimberley Kinder argues in her book, "The Radical Bookstore: Counterspace for Social Movements."
- Bookstores and activism "exist within a central paradox," per Kinder, straddling activist retail and capitalism; collective ownership and civic requirements; or donations and corporate power.
Between the lines: Indie bookstores often prioritize lifting diverse and marginalized voices on their shelves and at events, Gilman said.
Roundup: U.S. mission-driven bookstores
- Fabulosa Books in San Francisco specializes in LGBTQ+ books and launched a mission to counter book bans by allowing customers to buy books to send to LGBTQ+ organizations in conservative areas.
- The Latino Bookstore within the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio hosts author speaking events highlighting Texas Latino writers and Mexican American studies and Chicano scholars.
- Making Worlds is a bookstore and social center in Philadelphia that supports grassroots organizing and promotes resisting oppression worldwide.
- Bluestockings Cooperative in New York City's Lower East Side is queer, trans and sex worker-run. It hosts trainings on how to use Narcan to respond to opiate overdoses.
- Mil Mundos Books in Bushwick, Brooklyn, is a bilingual bookstore and community centers with Spanish language courses, a coworking space and mutual aid donation point.
- Red Emma's in Baltimore has its roots in the late 1990s "anti-globalization" movement, fighting against free-trade policies and economic inequality, per the NYT.
- Under the Umbrella provides a space for Salt Lake City's LGBTQ+ community where every book "is either queer in content and/or written by queer authors," the website said.
- Left Bank Books in Seattle has 70+ book sections including queer & trans, Black, Native, Latinx studies, as well as anarchism, race and colonialism, labor history and parenting. It also sponsors a program that provides free literature to prisoners.
- Tuby & Coo's in New Orleans is a "queer, liberationist decentralized independent bookshop" that is now travels throughout the city with multiple locations to ensure accessibility to readers across the area.
- Black Garnet Books in Saint Paul, Minnesota, was founded in the summer of 2020 as a response to violence and "the purposeful and unconscious exclusion of Black people from the literature community." It regularly hosts events and the shelves are curated with work by authors and illustrators of color.
Go deeper: Books most targeted for bans in 2023 centered on race, LGBTQ themes
