Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore [Preorder]

Available November 4, 2025 Longtime NBC News reporter Char Adams offers a deeply compelling and rigorously reported history of Black political movements as told through the lens of the Black-owned bookstore, which have been centers for organizing movements from abolition to Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter. Black-Owned celebrates the history of Black bookstores and their role as centerpieces of resistance and liberation. Drawn from the author’s in-depth research and reporting, Black-Owned is a story of activism,  espionage, violence, and perseverance. Char Adams details Black bookstores’ battles with racist vigilantes, local law enforcement, and federal agents as they fueled Black political movements throughout American history.This history begins with David Ruggles, the abolitionist who founded the country’s first Black-owned bookshop in New York in 1834, as well as the Black bibliophiles who carried the cause after the bookshop’s violent demise. In the twentieth century, a