“The Forgotten World of Communist Bookstores”

Toronto’s was on College just east of Spadina…

Communist bookstores provided a critical public space for radicals, operating in virtually every major American city. Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York had several apiece. Smaller and ostensibly less radical locales such as Birmingham, Houston, and Omaha, had communist bookstores, too. (…)

As avowed anticapitalists, communists made for unlikely business owners. But as entrepreneurs, their objective was to promote ideology and cover costs, not maximize profits. Red bookstores spread rapidly as the ranks of the consolidated Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) swelled during the Depression. By the end of the 1930s, roughly fifty communist bookstores were open for business. Their politics were also paradoxical. Unwavering supporters of Stalin abroad, American communists were relentless champions of democracy and civil liberties at home. And their bookstores helped them circulate a domestic agenda of racial and social equality. (…)

Literary scholar James Smethurst has shown, for example, how critical communist bookstores were for the mid-century Black Arts Movement. In Birmingham in the 1930s, a young musician by the name of Herman Blount — later known as Sun Ra, the incomparable jazz bandleader — regularly visited the party’s Ella Speed Bookstore, where he enjoyed public lectures and conversations on culture and politics with employees and customers. Decades later in Baltimore, the Black Arts poet Sam Cornish frequented the Free State’s successor, the New Era Bookstore, which published one of Cornish’s earliest poetry collections under its in-house Sacco Publishers imprint (named for Sacco and Vanzetti).