A few months ago, I came across a funny anecdote in this article summarising police surveillance against Black Anarchist jailhouse lawyer and radical educator, Martin Sostre & his partner and comrade Geraldine Robinson. It described a peculiar scene during a three day riot in Buffalo, New York against police brutality starting on the 27th of June 1967….
“And as the rebellion raged many of them took refuge in his store where cops on the street could not, for the moment, reach them and where they could, now in excited, eager tones as they sensed the potential of the revolt, discuss what had happened so far and what could be done. Even as the confused battle went on, young men bought books like Negroes With Guns, by Robert Williams and read them.” 1
Later in this same uprising, the windows to the store were blown out by fire hoses, which he assumed was intentional. Nevertheless he turned the boarded up window into a community bulletin board.
The Martin Sostre Institute write in their history of his Afro Asian Book Store;
“Sostre described his bookstore as a “community center,” where people could use the phone and toilet, borrow money, or get change for the parking meter. He later wrote that he hoped to make his bookshop the “main library of dissent and protest literature in Buffalo.” His use of “library” was deliberate. “You could come in and sit down and take a book off the shelf, read it and go through it and put it back and walk out.” Sostre sat and talked for great lengths with anyone who came in. Customers could pull any book off the shelf and read it until finished.”2
Martin’s bookstore carried on after he was arrested (a frame up job by the police over a $15 bag of drugs) , he even created a Black history lending library in prison! The legacy of a bookstore as a site of confrontation continues and should, in my humble opinion, be reproduced.
Social space, whether a literal bookstore, a meeting in a park or a group chat, magazine, journal or blog should reject the politics of ‘Safety’ & civility and the ever dampening force of legality. We should explicitly aim to not only stoke the existing dissent, but to elevate and escalate what is bubbling below the surface, a crucial confrontation is needed, desperately.
In Croydon, London youth waited around for the fash to turn up, they waited and waited. When the rumour went around that there were no EDL types coming in plainclothes, instead of packing up and going home they went for the uniformed ones, they formed crude barricades and attacked the police using fireworks and other projectiles.3
Every magazine, every social centre, every bookstore, street stall, impromptu backpack distro and archive should be home to these conversations that not only challenge the way we engage with each other and with physical things like books but to also inspire and encourage what’s needed for us to see any dignity in this world.
Let’s take on the challenge of not trapping ourselves in the ‘scene’, let’s reject just chanting the same 5 pre-approved chants at a fruitless a-to-b marche on saturday morning. Let’s find each other, figure out what we want and how we’re going take it.
You can learn more about Martin and his work here;
Mutt.■
Originally hosted on Mutt's Medium page here.
1- aavw.org/protest/subversive_huac_abstract08_excerpt.html
2 - psccunygc.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-content/blogs.dir/2710/files/2023/03/History-of-the-AABE.pdf
3 - actforfree.noblogs.org/2024/08/09/croydon-south-londonuk-if-they-fail-to-show-up-why-let-the-moment-go-to-waste/
Image: A branch of Martin Sostre’s Bookshop, the East West Book Shop. He was arrested shortly after purchasing the property. The text below the photo reads ‘The East West Bookshop — Martin had rented this storefornt and begin to fix it up as a branch store when he was arrested.’
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