From Abolition to Black Lives Matter: Harriett’s as a Bookshop, Social Activism Center, and Memorial

Walking under the black awning of Harriett’s Bookshop in Fishtown, Philadelphia, one might pause to contemplate the machete that slices through the letters. The silent power that the logo, the awning, and the bookshop radiate is a product of centuries of Black history and Black resistance, a determination to fight back while respecting those who have fought in years past.

Jeannine A. Cook, a Black woman educator, writer, entrepreneur, and activist, is the founder of Harriet’s Bookshop. As a child, she indulged in banned classics like Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (the author of which would eventually come to Harriett’s Bookshop in 2022 for The Color Purple‘s 40th anniversary).

Cook’s bookselling career began when, as a student at the University of Philadelphia, she sold books at the corner of Broad Street and Cecile B. Moore Avenue. In 2017, she subleased and began renovating a store at 7th and Gerard, planning to open a bookstore. But that original store burned down in an accidental fire — so Cook turned to education, working with teens who’d dropped out or gotten caught up in the justice system.

In fact, as a consultant and teacher, Cook has brought musicians, artists, and writers to classrooms, and developed an anti-racist curriculum. Her commitment to Black community, education, activism, and art has been reflected in her passion for Harriett’s — not unlike the passionate Black booksellers of the mid-20th century. Most of these early entrepreneurs, according to Joshua Clark Davis in “Liberation Through Literacy, “had extensive backgrounds in leftist and black nationalist politics or were teachers or writers or bibliophiles” (38). Jeannine Cook is dedicated to Black politics, activism, and making change through education and Black literature, as shown throughout her persistence in keeping Harriett’s alive.

So, while Cook’s first location was reduced to ashes, her dream was still alight. Two years later, her sister forwarded her an old email in which Cook detailed her love for writing. In the meantime, Cook was compiling an anthology of all the works she’d written up to that point, titling it “Conversations with Harriett” and spelling the name with two T’s, just like Harriett Tubman did.

Inevitably, the history of Harriett’s Bookshop is intertwined with that of Harriett Tubman. Tubman, for which the bookshop is named, escaped from slavery in the American South in the nineteenth century to become an abolitionist. In 1849, she fled to Philadelphia, and stayed there until she ran to Baltimore about a year later. Over the next decade, she led about 70 enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad. Tubman has gone down in history as a Black woman known for her persistence, courage, and discipline.

Cook’s vision for the bookstore was a way to honor Harriett Tubman (someone she believes doesn’t get enough historical credit); to create dialogue about community and global issues; and to celebrate women artists, activists, and writers. She describes the “foundational texts” of the store as being those of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Octavia Butler. In fact, the first Harriett’s T-shirts were just a simple list of those authors’ first names.

At 258 E. Girard Avenue, Cook signed another lease. The grand opening was like an art gallery, with iconic Black-women-authored books displayed in the storefront and Philadelphia Poet Laureate Trapeta B. Mayson featured. Afterwards, people considered the store to be a hangout spot, safe space, and sanctuary.

But just six weeks later, COVID-19 struck, and Cook was devastated as the brick-and-mortar store had to close. Still, the shop stayed alive online and on the streets. With the help of “Dr. Gina” South, an ER doctor at Pennsylvania Hospital — and Cook’s dedication to activism– Harriet’s launched the “Essentials for Essentials” initiative in the spring of 2020. Community members could buy books for, and send thank-you notes to, essential workers. Hundreds of books were hand-delivered to local hospitals, and the initial inventory sold out within a single hour. Cook also set up a grab-and-go shop on the sidewalk, relying on the honor’s system to gain revenue. In an interview, Cook says, “I broke a lot of furniture. I got rained on. But people need books more than ever at that point.”

Following the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, paid interns at Harriett’s — called “youth conductors” — assembled signs that said “I CAN’T BREATHE.” These were the last words of Eric Garner, a Black man killed by police. Then, after the tragic killing of George Floyd, Harriett’s Instagram following spiked from 3,000 to 30,000 in the span of a single weekend. At protests, the bookstore began distributing Black books for free, including The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Brown, and works by Tubman herself. Today, Cook has donated over 100 books to protestors and passerby of the store.

With these killings ever-present in the media, Harriett’s received a swell of orders for anti-racist works, such as How to Be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi. That spring, Cook traveled to Minneapolis, where she donated the first of 1,200 inspirational and instructive books that would be handed out to organizers and activists. She also did this in Philadelphia’s City Hall, where she was nearly shot by a police sniper. The bookstore itself suffered violence, too: protests following the killing of Walter Wallace, Jr., a 27-year-old Black man, in West Philadelphia made Harriett’s a target. Neighboring stores’ windows were shattered. Harriett’s received death threats via email. White men outside the shop, who proclaimed themselves “protectors” of police, wielded baseball bats.

But through everything, Cook explains that books have been a way to protest racism and fight for Black activism. And despite the neighborhood being majority-white, they’ve been “hella supportive.” “When I went over to Minneapolis for the day to pay respects to George Floyd, there was a woman standing out in front of the bookshop just so that nobody would mess with it,” she said in one interview.

Below, I include a timeline of events for Harriett’s and its connections to the BLM movement.

Then, in April 2021, Cook was worried about the rising cost of rent for her building. So she started a GoFundMe to buy a permanent location for Harriett’s, with the goal of raising $300,000. She raised $75,000 in the first weekend alone. While she was able to purchase her new location in July 2022, the campaign remained open and is still up (as of now, the bookshop has raised $240,250). She also hired historical preservation architects to make it feel like the refuge Tubman saw when she came to Philadelphia back in 1849.

In July of that same year Cook started a virtual congressional petition to make Harriett Tubman Day (March 10th, the anniversary of Tubman’s death) a federal holiday. Thanks to Cook’s petitioning efforts, it is now official in Philadelphia. In 2022, the Harriett Tubman Day Act went up for consideration by the U.S. Congress, although no-vote was scheduled. Still, author-activist Nikole Hannah-Jones visited Harriett’s that April to see the in-store immersive display that paid honor to her book, The 1619 Project.

Harriett’s monthly theme for February 2022 was “reparations,” echoing the bookshop’s core themes of Black discussion and activism. They launched the Sisterhood Sit-In Trolley Tour, a two-hour tour through Philadelphia’s Black-women-owned businesses. And yet, perhaps the most notable decision on Cook’s part was to take a vow of silence every day of that month from sunup to sundown. It was an effort to oppose the commercialization of Black History Month: to take a step back, to listen, and to observe with respect. To acknowledge the atrocities that Black people have faced, then and now.

It was a justified response. That fall, after the bookstore received violent, threatening, and racist emails, Cook posted a black-and-white photo of her ancestors: two Caribbean sisters holding machetes. Machetes, she wrote in the bookshop’s Instagram post, “are designed to preserve and protect humanity”; and she called on her supporters to do just that. Harriett’s hosted a Sisterhood Sit-In with Fabricka’s, a local restaurant and cabaret, which included an anonymous umbrella parade in a beautiful procession down the street from Fabricka’s to Harriett’s.

Historically, Black bookstores have been known as places of communal resistance, and that “black booksellers understood their shops as free spaces or sites of liberation and empowerment” (Davis 37). Cook not only dedicates her bookshop to such a morale, but also — through traditional hand-delivery systems, organized protests, and the iconic machete in Harriett’s logo — the history of Black activism itself.

Sources

Bienasz, Gabrielle. “She Founded a Black Bookstore in a White Neighborhood. Then George Floyd was Killed.” Inc., Mansueto Ventures, 9 June 2020, https://www.inc.com/gabrielle-bienasz-changing-the-world-through-books.html.

“Black Lives Matter: a timeline of the movement.” Cosmopolitan, Hearst UK, 21 April 2021, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a32728194/black-lives-matter-timeline-movement/.

“Black History Milestones: Timeline.” History.com, A&E Television Networks LLC, 11 May 2023, https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/black-history-milestones.

Cook, Jeannine. “A Home for Harriett’s Bookshop.” GoFundMe, 2023, https://www.gofundme.com/f/harriettsbookshop.

Cook, Jeannine. “We need a federal holiday to honor Harriett Tubman.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC, 20 May 2022, https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/hariet-tubman-day-congress-federal-holiday-20220520.html.

Davis, Joshua C. “Liberation Through Literacy: African American Bookstores, Black Power, and the Mainstreaming of Black Books.” From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise of Activist Entrepreneurs, Edited by Devin Fergus, Lewis Hyman, Bethany Moreton, and Julia Ott. Columbia University Press, pp. 35-82, https://susqu.instructure.com/courses/4398/files/457836/download?download_frd=1.

Harriett’s Bookshop [@harrietts_bookshop].

Harriett’s Bookshop [@harrietts_bookshop]. Jeannine Cook in front of Harriett’s Storefront. Instagram, 2 Feb. 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/B8EfHC7jJmj/.

Harriett’s Bookshop [@harrietts_bookshop]. Photo of Two Caribbean Sisters Holding Machetes. Instagram, 4 Sept. 2020, https://www.instagram.com/p/CEtpkNsDfPX/.

“Harriet Tubman.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 23 Sept. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harriet-Tubman.

McCutcheon, Lauren. “Generation Change Philly: The Literary Activist.” The Philadelphia Citizen, 19 May 2022, https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/jeannine-cook-philly/.

Moody, Eric. “This Philly bookstore owner found a different way to protest.” 6abc, ABC, Inc., 10 June 2020, https://6abc.com/jeannine-a-cooks-bookshop-owner-donate-s-free-books-during-protest/6240981/.

“Parents of Walter Wallace Jr. demand justice and police reform in Philadelphia.” 6abc, ABC, Inc., 7 May 2021, https://6abc.com/walter-wallace-jr-shooting-philadelphia-police-police-involved-west-philly-protest/10594187/.

Poitevien, Jessica. “This Philadelphia Bookstore Honors Harriet Tubman’s Legacy With Literature, Art, and Activism.” Travel + Leisure, Fact checked by Jillian Dara, Travel + Leisure Co., 20 Oct. 2022, https://www.travelandleisure.com/trip-ideas/harrietts-bookshop-philadelphia.

Rebolini, Arianna. “Harriett’s Bookshop Owner Jeannine Cook Says Connection Is at the Root of Everything.” Oprah Daily, Oprah Daily LLC, 28 Feb. 2022, https://www.oprahdaily.com/entertainment/books/a39186848/jeannine-cook-harrietts-bookshop/.

Samuel, Ruth E. “Bookstore named after Harriet Tubman celebrates women authors, artists and activists.” Today, NBC Universal, 12 April 2021, https://www.today.com/money/philadelphia-s-harriett-s-bookshop-celebrates-women-color-authors-t214023.