Sydney Smith

“Reading for the Revolution” examines Black bookstores, book clubs, publishing houses, and other Black reading communities on the South Side of Chicago during the twentieth century. While scholars have well documented the boom in Black print during the civil rights and Black Power eras, little is known about how these works circulated amongst urban Black communities. Drawing on interdisciplinary methods from history, urban studies, digital humanities, and descriptive bibliography, this project explores how Black bookstores foregrounded literacy in urban struggles over employment, housing, and education. It harnesses digital storytelling to activate this history and provide a model for how to build autonomous spaces for cultural education in the present.