Meet the Columbus Black-Owned Bookstore Collective

Tracy Ramey founded the pop-up bookshop Tastes & Tomes with representation in mind, telling Matter News last year about the importance of making available a curated selection of texts that can serve as both “mirrors and windows,” offering views into the lives of those with different lived experiences while also allowing readers of diverse backgrounds a place in which they can see themselves reflected.

These ideas have intensified in recent months, particularly after Ramey read Black Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore, by Char Adams, which served as a needed reminder that the existence of Tastes & Tomes can be viewed as a revolutionary act in and of itself. 

“A Black woman selling books out of a trunk is pretty radical,” said Ramey, who sees the pop-up serving as part of the rich lineage of Black-owned bookstores, the first of which opened in New York City in 1834, with abolitionist owner David Ruggles creating a safe house for formerly enslaved people that functioned as a reading room and a distribution point for anti-slavery literature for nearly a year before it was destroyed by a mob. 

“And he was like, ‘I’m going to keep doing this no matter how many times they burn the building down,’” said Ramey, who recently teamed with fellow area Black booksellers Barbara Bailey (Eqstesi by B.E.E.) and Megan Turner (Rooted Books) to form the Columbus Black-Owned Bookstore Collective – an organization brainstormed just two weeks ago after Ramey learned about the inaugural National Black Bookstore Day, which takes place on Tuesday, April 7. (To mark the occasion, the newborn collective will host a panel discussion at Zora’s House from 6-8 p.m. that evening.) “And I want to be part of that fire, where it’s like, ‘You can try to burn us down, but you can’t stop us. There’s always going to be someone there to carry the flame.’”

Ramey has been forced to tap into this resilience within herself since she spoke with Matter News last May, having lost multiple pregnancies to miscarriage. And yet, Ramey described motherhood as transformative, sharing how it reinforced in her the idea that Tastes & Tomes can be more than a bookshop, becoming part of a legacy that can be passed on to her daughter. “And it’s not even just monetarily, but I want them to have this ancestral legacy,” said Ramey, who has also found in her child an unexpected source of inspiration. “She has diabetes, so, what you hear in the background is her pump. And so, she gets up every day and fights for what she needs to do to survive. And I feel that is something I have to do with this.”

Prior to helping form the Columbus Black-Owned Bookstore Collective, Ramey said most of her attention had been focused on National Independent Bookstore Day, set to take place this year on Saturday, April 25. And while Ramey celebrated the city’s thriving indie bookstore scene, she also acknowledged that Black-owned shops can provide readers of color, in particular, with a space in which their experiences and needs are more fully centered. “Having a space or an outlet for us is different than going in [a shop] where maybe you find a Black book on the shelf, or maybe you find an indie author you’re looking for, or a staff recommendation,” she said, adding that with a Black-owned store, “It’s just a different feeling, a different vibe.”

The Columbus Black-Owned Bookstore Collective is reflective of a larger nationwide trend, which has seen the number of Black-owned bookstores grow from just 54 across the United States a decade ago to more than 300, according to the first State of the Black Bookstore Report, released earlier this year by the National Association of Black Bookstores. There’s still a long way to go, however, with Black-owned stores completely absent in 14 states and more than one-third of the shops currently in existence lacking defined real estate. The report notes that 36 percent of the 306 Black-owned stores documented operate without a permanent brick-and-mortar location, which is true of Tastes & Tomes, Eqstesi, and Rooted Books, which hosted its debut pop-up in early April.

Ramey said that having the support of the collective will enable her to lean into the more radical aspects of bookselling, pointing to her desire to highlight and champion those authors whose books have been targeted for removal from schools and libraries – a large percentage of whom are writers of color.

“And I picked banned books because I feel like it’s a threat to freedom of speech, to freedom of expression,” said Ramey, who also wants Tastes & Tomes as exist as a space in which topics sometimes viewed as taboo within the Black community, such as LGBTQ+ issues, can be learned about and discussed openly. “There are so many things we don’t talk about, or that are seen as taboo, and it comes to a point where I’m like, ‘I wish someone would talk about this.’ And so, I think there are opportunities with having and offering books and partnering with other like-minded organizations.”

Though still in its infancy, Ramey and Co. have big plans for the collective, which the members eventually intend to establish as a nonprofit, envisioning it serving as a place of shared strategizing and support. “I don’t know exactly where we’ll push each other, but we’re all a bunch of Black women who are educators or former educators, so it feels like the sky’s the limit,” Ramey said. “I found community with other pop-up bookstores last year, but finding community with other Black-owned bookstores [in Columbus] … has meant the world.”