Alumni Start Movement to Lift Up Black-Owned Bookstores | Alumni - Princeton Alumni Weekly

A new collective seeks to educate while also funding Black authors and booksellers, as Princeton Alumni Weekly reports.

Edwin Rosales ’17 and Masani Barnwell, the owner of Source of Knowledge bookstore in Newark, N.J., during the virtual launch of Turn The Page.
Photo: Jasmine Wang ’18

Watching the nationwide protests after the death of George Floyd, Edwin Rosales ’17 wondered what to do to support the emerging movement. In particular, Rosales — who was an aspiring playwright in the first year of graduate studies at the Yale School of Drama at that time — wondered how the growing trend of people buying “anti-racist” literature could be used to help Black communities more directly. Then, Rosales had an epiphany.

“I was thinking, what can I do? What can I do with my access to these privilege networks? ... All my friends who love literature, what can we do?” Rosales started gauging the interest of friends about whether they would commit to buying a work of Black literature from a Black-owned bookstore every month. “And there was a lot of excitement for the idea,” Rosales says.

Thus began Turn The Page: A Movement to Lift Up Black-Owned Bookstores (TTP), a collective Rosales co-leads with three others — Abigail Jean-Baptiste ’18, Tyler Cruz, and Malia West. The group has partnered with Source of Knowledge, a Black-owned bookstore in Newark, New Jersey, to ensure that the burgeoning interest in anti-racist literature during the protests over the summer also empowers the communities that most directly feel the impact of systemic racism. The goal is to get people to “decolonize their bookshelves,” as Rosales says, both in the literature people read and the ways they buy books...

Rosales says buying from Black-owned bookstores and reading Black authors helps create an economic shift. “You move the capital from one community to another one. Amazon specifically was doing very well during the pandemic, but a lot of small businesses, such as Source of Knowledge, were struggling and were facing economic barriers,” Rosales says.

In August, the collective launched its website (www.turnthepagemovement.org). Since June, the group’s collections of recommended readings and purchasing instructions primarily have been promoted via the group’s Facebook page and Instagram account (@turnthepagemovement). As the collective considers ways to expand its influence and audience, the group’s leaders are determined to keep it a grassroots movement. 
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Source: Princeton Alumni Weekly