When Alexis Pauline Gumbs thought she’d lent all her copies of The Salt Eaters to friends, she called every bookstore in her area to find another copy. But none of them carried the book — Toni Cade Bambara's classic novel about black people searching for healing — and that didn’t sit right with Gumbs.
Her fruitless search underscored a deeper grievance about the unavailability of black feminist texts, both in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina where she lives and more broadly. Frustrated, she resolved to do something about it.
Gumbs, a queer, black feminist author, had already been running a lending and reference library out of her home for several years. Dubbed "The Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind," the library served as an outgrowth of personal collections from Gumbs and locals Julia Roxanne Wallace and Courtney Reid-Eaton. Bolstered by book donations and other projects in which the three were involved, they’d lend classic texts and let people peruse hard-to-find titles. The trio had talked about their shared fantasy of creating a bookmobile and taking it on the road, especially around their local community. With the Durham Public Library under renovation until 2020 and the selections at local stores lacking, Gumbs and her counterparts decided to take action: The trio is transforming an Airstream trailer into what Gumbs called “a tiny, black feminist nerd utopia.”
There used to be a lot more feminist bookstores. Proliferating in the 1970s and '80s, they popped up across North America, often run by lesbians and women of color. But by the 1990s, the movement had started to decline. A similar proliferation occurred with radical, black-owned bookstores during the height of the Black Power movement in the U.S., with their popularity fading by the beginning of the 1980s, before a resurgence in the early '90s, according to The Atlantic. Now, a new trend is emerging in their place: mobile, black-owned book operations, most of them feminist and politically radical.
Gumbs’ Black Feminist Bookmobile is one of them. Alongside Wallace and Reid-Eaton, she’s fundraising $10,000 to get the Airstream up and running. When it’s ready, the bookmobile will function as a lending and reference library rather than a store.
Gumbs said the project has grown from the legacy of feminist bookstores. She grew up in Atlanta, where she frequented Charis Books & More, a feminist bookstore founded in 1974 that still stands, and that Gumbs called a “profoundly supportive space.”
“I grew up in Atlanta, and I grew up at the bookstore,” Gumbs told Teen Vogue, adding that the writing workshops she attended at Charis were “foundational” to her. “I started to identify as a black feminist there.”
Without its example, she said, she wouldn’t have dreamed up the Black Feminist Bookmobile.
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Gumbs' Black Feminist Bookmobile isn’t the first of its kind. In 2014, Brooklyn native OlaRonke Akinmowo launched the Free Black Women’s Library. On the last Sunday of every month, Akinmowo installs the books somewhere like an art gallery or a community center. All of the books are written by black women, and it functions as a free library where people access the collection by bringing a donation to trade for something else.
The books aren’t necessarily all feminist in content, but Akinmowo considers the mobile library to be an explicitly black feminist venture.
“I see it as a black feminist project in that, for me, it’s a way to kind of confront patriarchy and it’s a way to confront racism,” she told Teen Vogue. “Black women writers are rarely centered in a lot of the conversations. I feel like it’s a way to bring that to the forefront and sort of shift people’s perspectives, and think about books and reading a little differently.”
By focusing on black women, Akinmowo said she’s helping people realize that their high school and/or college reading curriculum likely excluded important names. “You might’ve missed out on having a deeper conversation about race and gender," she said, "because these titles weren’t given to you.”
Akinmowo covers a range of genres. She offers a lot of classics, including writers Audre Lorde, Zora Neale Hurston, and June Jordan, and young-adult fiction and nonfiction. But she’d like to add more science fiction and horror, and a wider representation of authors.
Like Gumbs, Akinmowo travels. She’ll pack a “mini-installation” for a weekend, putting two dresses and a couple hundred books in her suitcases, heading somewhere like Baltimore or Philadelphia. She said she received the warmest welcome in Chicago, where locals created their own Free Black Women’s Library and have hosted several events. Akinmowo hopes others will follow.
But lugging books around isn’t easy. That’s why she has also been raising money for a vehicle, or other physical space in which to install the library so that her collection doesn't consume her Brooklyn studio apartment.
“I just need it to be more sustainable,” she said. “It just feels like it’s on a shaky foundation now.”
Meanwhile, Diarra “Crckt” Leggett is already running a four-wheeled book operation. Two years ago, he considered buying the used bookstore where he worked in Greensboro, North Carolina, an hour west of Gumbs. But he realized it would be too expensive, and instead opted to go mobile with the Boomerang Bookshop: Nomad Chapter, which is housed in a four-wheeled short bus he named “Eartha” that cruises around the city.
Every wall of the Boomerang Bookshop minibus has been converted to bookshelves. Titles range from the Duke/Carolina basketball rivalry to Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. The youth section includes a book about consent and Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History. While not explicitly a feminist project, Boomerang is a black-owned bookmobile with a decidedly political bent.
“I privilege writers from underrepresented and marginalized groups over the standardized canon of old, dead white guy authors,” Leggett told Teen Vogue. “There’s not that much room, so I can’t afford to pad it with crap.”
As part of Leggett's day job working for a nearby library system, he drives a children’s bookmobile. The outreach effort largely extends to poor, black, urban neighborhoods. He’s glad they’re making reading more accessible, but Leggett has little control over the selection here, which he said lacks contemporary literary fiction by writers of color.
Leggett and his counterparts agreed that accessibility — in regard to location, pricing, and selection — is a key factor they consider.
“I try to keep my books priced really reasonably and affordably,” Leggett said. “I want good books and reading material to be available.”
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For Akinmowo, access is a reason to keep her project free.
“It needs to be as accessible as possible,” she said. “If you don’t have money, you can still take part in whatever’s going on, whatever the activity is. I’d rather just say, 'Here, take it.'”
Despite fear of a retail apocalypse, independent bookstores are thriving. Among the new shops opening is Café Con Libros, a feminist bookstore in Brooklyn owned by an Afro-Latinx woman. It’s possible Gumbs, Akinmowo, and Leggett will take the brick-and-mortar approach someday, too. But it’s just as likely that more mobile, radical operations like theirs will pop up around the country, each one offering its own unique take.
Related: How Black Women Have Impacted Feminism Over Time
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