It’s a bright Saturday afternoon in Liberty City, and Roots Bookstore and Market is buzzing with activity. Two months after its Juneteenth opening, the shop on NW 15th Ave. across the street from the Liberty Square housing projects is hosting its first-ever book signing from local children’s book author Kiara Young. The floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves are filled to the brim with secondhand books from esteemed authors — Toni Morrison and Angela Davis, but also Haruki Murakami, Khalil Gibran, and Ernest Hemingway — as well as volumes on sports, fashion, history, and local life.
“Our goal is to ensure we’re a Black-owned bookstore, but we don’t have only Black authors in the store,” says Phillip Agnew, co-owner of Roots. “We believe that Black people, that people in this city, should have access to all of the knowledge that is available to them in the world.”
Books run in the Agnew family. Phillip’s father worked as a book merchant in Chicago, and about 70 percent of the shop’s current stock is sourced from his collection. The rest comes from community donations. The shop is a true passion project for its owners, longtime organizers and educators in Miami. Isaiah Thomas is an assistant principal at Paul L. Dunbar K-8 Center in Overtown and was born and raised in Miami-Dade County. Agnew, meanwhile, moved to the city from Chicago in 2012 to help start Dream Defenders, a nonprofit activist organization launched in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s killing…