BLACK BOOKSTORES

BLACK BOOKSTORE OWNERS Black booksellers have a really hard go. I was one for awhile, although not full time. I sold books out of the trunk of my car , at book fairs and events. My sales were mainly direct and only occasionally through the mail. I sold through my The Nile Company , as an adjunct to my black historical newsletter , "The Nile Review." At one time, I had seriously contemplated opening a bookstore in Kansas City, Missouri. But fortunately, the late great jazz musician, Sonny Kenner , in his quiet way, dissuaded me from that folly in the 1980s. He had said "The music sales would probably carry your book sales." Say what again? He then went on to tell me that he had been a KC bookstore owner in the 1960s, but had to give it up. He could not make enough money to support his family so, music was it! But book lovers, like me, naturally assume that others like books too to the same degree . We have read and been inspired by tales of Timbuktu , Mali, where book sales were leading commercial ventures among Africans, before enslavers came. (Of course this is only partly true. The books were in Arabic who were the main slave traders of the black, before the Europeans came.) I sold books in high school through the Students for Black Awareness and Action organization, (SBAA), with my friends to raise money for our activities. My love of books has been insatiable for a very long time! Of course, I have visited and done business with Julian Books in San Francisco, with Schomburg Books in New York, with McKinney's Books in Washington, D. C. , and others in St. Louis and elsewhere. But this day I lift up the name of Hodari Ali , who was the greatest black bookseller personally known to me. He began to write to me in high school, when I was Editor in Chief of the HILLTOP, the weekly student newspaper of Howard University in 1972-1973. He was in Los Angeles and was an enthusiastic admirer of mine, from a distance, then. He soon came to Howard and later became Editor in Chief, himself of the HILLTOP . I was in law school by then, and later graduated and transplanted back to Missouri , my home state, albeit in Kansas City, not in St. Louis. I came to learn that the late great Hodari Ali of Los Angeles, Howard University; of Washington, DC's Pyramid Bookstore had also been a regional bookseller of black books, up and down the East Coast. I had admired him. I visited his bookstore in D.C., on a corner near Howard, to purchase some books and was lucky to be waited upon by him. Hodari was now taciturn , laconic, no longer the outgoing enthusiastic young man whom I remembered. Any business will do that to you, especially if the business is the sales of books to black folks; many think that they already know all that they need to know, just by being black. Little do they know that being "black" is a construct like "white;" that before they were black they were many other things, say ancient writers including gods!