The first Black-owned children’s bookstore in North Carolina will reopen next week after online threats forced its closure earlier this year, and it collected a huge boost from a TikTok influencer to kick off its new chapter.
Liberation Station has relocated to Hill Street near St. Augustine’s University thanks to more than $60,000 raised through a Gofundme campaign, and the store settled in a corner of Southeast Raleigh with deep roots. A few doors down, Sylvester White has operated a family barber shop for 60 years, not far from the Southeast Raleigh house his family has occupied for a century. Both the St. Monica Teen Center and Tarboro Road Community Center sit a few blocks away — anchors in Raleigh’s Black community.
“It feels like a homecoming,” owner Victoria Scott-Miller said. “It just feels right. This is a time of so much polarization in this country. We needed a space.”
Rising to the Occasion
She opened Liberation Station on Fayetteville Street in 2023, aiming to be a place where Black children and adults could see themselves in literature. Each book sold there is written by a Black author and read by both the owners and their children before going on the shelves…