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When the City of San Francisco inducted Marcus Books into its famed preservation registry, Dr. Jasmine Johnson considered it less of a historical marker than a historical erasure.
“All these historical landmarks are tombstones. It’s the only way for the city to reconcile with itself,” laments Jasmine, granddaughter of Marcus Books’ founders, Julian and Raye Richardson. “It’s shameful, or not even shameful, but an embarrassment — the history of Black and Brown out. All these signposts show all the ways Black folks are ghosts in the city.”
Jasmine’s hurt flows from the hypocrisy. Just as many other cities honor Black people as they remove them, San Francisco honored Marcus Books, the same year the family was forced off the property. The cutting irony estranged Jasmine from her old Fillmore neighborhood, which she now describes as “gross,” and from San Francisco, which she now describes as “a deeply beautiful and deeply inhospitable place.”
Jasmine says she has only been back to the former site of Marcus Books once, by accident.
“The building — the Victorian —that the store was in, there’s like big Victorian steps that go out. And every Fourth of July weekend was a jazz festival. Those stairs used to be filled, and my mom would have her own… she’d just create her own band. Like, forget the formal festival schedule. She would just have the folks in the community who were musicians perform right there in front of the bookstore. It was the spot to be. There would always be people crowded on those steps. My sisters and I would play on those steps with friends.
Katie Mitchell’s new book, “Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores.” (Cover image courtesy Clarkson Potter)
“And that time, I drove by… the people who had bought the house had put a gate on the stairs, and I just thought it was just so deeply antithetical to the previous lives of that house.”
It was, in a word, gross.
Before the gross gate, before the tombstone of a historical marker, before the flood of gentrification, buyouts, and evictions, Marcus Books brimmed as an epicenter of Black cultural life.
Or as the city would note in its swan song Landmark Designation Report, Marcus Books’ San Fransisco location was “a center for Black intellectualism and idea exchange,” “a community centerpiece for Black San Franciscans,” “a space of Black community collectivity, empowerment, and action,” and “a haven where Black people ‘didn’t have to apologize for their difference, their intellect, or their pain from racism.’”
Founded originally by the Richardsons as Success Printing in 1946, the bookstore began in 1960. “I began ordering so many Black books for Raye and myself, and for friends, that I had to hire a clerk. Before I knew it, the front of the printing ship had been transformed into the Success Bookstore,” Julian Richardson explained in 1975.
The couple changed the store’s name to Marcus Books in 1964 after Marcus Garvey. Marcus Books is credited as the longest continuously operating Black bookstore in the United States. Throughout its tenure, the store has been family-owned, and is now run by Julian and Raye’s daughter Blanche Richardson and granddaughter, Cherysse Calhoun. Their son Billy runs the print shop in the back. Julian and Raye’s daughter and Karen daughter Tamiko and husband Greg ran the Marcus Books San Francisco location before it closed.
Jasmine remembers growing up “quite literally in the bookstore,” enveloped in a soaring symphony of Black discourse. As her grandfather told writer Gene Ulansky in the mid-1970s, “I’d rather rap about Black roots and uprootedness than sell you a book.”
“Conversations about Black folk, Black history, Black politics, Black wellness, Black maternity was kind of everybody’s business, and everybody’s voice was invited into that conversation, just by way of stepping into the door” Jasmine reminisces. “It was a certain kind of magic.”
A Black mother and child reading at Marcus Books. (Photo courtesy Clarkson Potter)
Part of the magic flowed from interacting with the stream of renowned artists, activists, and authors gracing the store. Jasmine recalls Harry Belafonte (“really profound”), Rosa Parks (“just power, this like historical figure embodied”), Toni Morrison (“stunning – she’s my favorite”), B.B. King (“my mom was freaking out”) and so many more.
The intoxicating mix of the everyday and the extraordinary explains why locals fought so hard to save Marcus Books, and why the loss of the San Francisco location resounded with such pain for all those who relied on the bookshop as a home and a haven.
In so many ways, Marcus Books’ story is Black San Francisco’s story is Black urban Americas’ story. It is a story that scholar and poet Eve Ewing describes as “a pattern of Black post-industrialized cities that have large populations of Black people who are hanging on as the cities continue to be remade and evolved in ways that are not for us.”
As Ewing explains, “These cities are transforming themselves into the new iteration of what they want to be in the 21st century, [and] the presence of poor Black people is inconvenient for that plan.”
Looking at those considered “inconvenient” in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Washington D.C., in San Francisco, one cannot help but wonder what will happen to all of the vibrancy that the Black communities have built in these locales over all these decades.
One cannot help but ask what James Baldwin asked, peering out at all of the hostility that the world aimed at his Harlem: “What will happen to all that beauty?”
Where would all of that music, all of that discourse, all of that art, all of those schools, churches, and bookstores go?
The question of displacement remains a thorny one for a people as nomadic as Black Americans who, during the Great Migration, fled from Georgia to New York, from Mississippi to Chicago, from Louisiana to the California coast, and who now in the age of gentrification, are fleeing once more.
In so many ways, that question, that central question of displacement, of removal, of a desire for home, swirls at the very heart of the story of Marcus Books’ namesake Marcus Garvey, who, in an effort to preserve the Black mind, the Black body, the Black society, proposed returning us all the way back to the motherland.
Embedded deep in Garvey’s bold declarations, in his words and deeds, in his insistence on Black pageantry, was the elevation of Black beauty. In Garveyites’ summoning of huge Black parades, the bustling Black band and choirs, the dressing of Black officers in full regalia—one could see an answer to Baldwin’s concerns about where would Black beauty go.
It would go with us. Our Blackness casts beauty like a shadow, and it follows us from the South to the cities, from the cities to the suburbs, from the suburbs to wherever we might go.
Black beauty certainly followed Marcus Books, when it consolidated operations to its second location in Oakland, where the store’s legacy and works lives on, unfolding both in past and present tense. This is what Jasmine describes as Marcus’s “ongoingness,” the fact that the store is “a museum in a sense but it’s a living one — that’s still creating things.”
Behind the bricks of its beautiful facade featuring Black books and authors of yesteryear, the store is still a hub of community, creating unchoreographed conversation, spaces to debate, spaces to convene, spaces to iterate on Black political thought, spaces, as Jasmine sees them, to honor the “deep regard for the rigor of Black literacy and Black intellect.”
Standing in that store, it becomes evident that the beauty of Marcus is more than an artifact, more than a history. It is right now still here.
Reprinted with permission from Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores by Katie Mitchell. Copyright © 2025 by Katherine Anne Mitchell. Photographs, unless otherwise noted, copyright © 2025 by Julien James. Published by Clarkson Potter, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
