First Black-Owned Children’s Bookstore in NC Forced to Move After Threats

Duane Miller, Victoria Scott-Miller, and their two sons.

The first Black-owned children’s bookstore in North Carolina was forced to close their downtown Raleigh location after the owners received a barrage of threats spanning back months.

The Liberation Station Bookstore was started by Victoria Scott-Miller and her husband, Duane Miller, with a simple mission in mind — to find books by Black authors that would resonate with their two young Black sons. “Our criteria was to find Black authors illustrators and stories that weren’t based in trauma,” Scott-Miller told CBS 17.

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They began selling books out of the trunk of their car, before opening a brick-and-mortar location in downtown Raleigh last year.

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But things quickly took a turn for the worst.

“Since September, we’ve faced numerous threats following the opening of our store. Some we brushed off, while others included disturbing phone calls detailing what our son Langston wore when he was at the shop alone,” wrote the store’s owners in a Facebook post.

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At first, they say that they tried to create strategies to avoid being targeted by doing things like switching their hours of operation and taking turns overseeing the storefront. But as the hate mail and death threats kept rolling in, they eventually decided to move out of their location.

While they expressed disappointment at moving from a location that they felt best served their community, they say this isn’t the road for their store. The store will remain open to the public until April 13th, and they say they will donate any remaining inventory to literacy non-profits in the Raleigh area.

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“While April 30th will mark our departure from 208 Fayetteville St, it certainly won’t mark the end of Liberation Station Bookstore. There is so much more work to be done,” they wrote. “With revolutionary love, literacy, and justice for all.”