More than places to buy books, these neighborhood institutions serve as classrooms, gathering spaces, and engines of change.
Marc Lamont Hill was never the same after his brother Anthony gave him a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X when he was a teenager.
The iconic 1965 account of the life of the revolutionary, from his impoverished childhood to his rise as a civil rights leader, took Hill on a journey for knowledge of the self, to understand not only who he was, but — an important facet of Malcolm X’s philosophy — who he could transform into. The book transformed a kid whose reading skewed more toward the wrestling magazines he bought at the Bridge-Pratt El station into a reader who told himself, I want to do what Malcolm’s doing. And it did one other important thing.
“It took me to maybe my favorite bookstore in Philadelphia at the time,” he says. “It took me to Hakim’s on 52nd Street.”…