Sacred Shelves

In May 2021, I walked into Marcus Books, a small Black-owned bookstore in Oakland. I had never been to the store, which was lined with rows upon rows of books housed on wooden shelves, but I knew its storied history. It’s the oldest Black bookstore still in existence in the U.S., founded in 1960, and named after political activist Marcus Garvey. Most importantly, it’s fiercely committed to advocating "for Black history, exchange, and knowledge of self." Marcus Books is an Oakland institution, and as I browsed the shelves, picking up everything from graphic novels to canonical books by Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, and other Black feminist thinkers I have learned from, I was holding my breath.

I was hoping against hope that Marcus Books was carrying copies of my debut book, Lifting As We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box.

Since I’d released the book one month into the COVID-19 pandemic, I’d never seen it in a bookstore. If I could see it on the shelves for the first time in a Black bookstore of such cultural and political importance, then that would make the experience all the more meaningful. The more I browsed, the more I lost hope.

But then I saw it.

The yellow cover peeked out at me near the front of the store, shelved beside other middle-grade books written by Black authors. The tears began flowing and didn’t stop, even after the kind bookseller let me sign a copy for customers and took a photo of me with the book for their own archives.