“Our origin story is unique,” Victoria Scott-Miller said about Liberation Station, a Raleigh, N.C., indie bookstore owned and operated by her and her family that opened its doors on the weekend of June 17–19, to coincide with the Juneteenth holiday. It was, Scott-Miller said, a three-day “meteoric grand opening” celebration that drew 4,000 people to West Fayetteville Street for a full slate of author appearances, music, and activities. Liberation Station, which specializes in children’s and YA books by Black authors and illustrators, is North Carolina’s first Black-owned children’s bookstore, replacing a pop-up bookstore of the same name. Scott-Miller, who is a children’s book author, operated the pop-up for four years with her family, having launched it in 2019 with 113 children’s books written by Black authors or illustrated by Black illustrators that convey positive representations of Black children and their families.

While the direct impetus to sell books was in response to the lack of books by Black authors or illustrators featuring Black children as protagonists when Scott-Miller browsed at a Barnes & Noble four years ago with her eldest son, Langston, who was then eight years old, she said the decision was perhaps inevitable. “My husband, Duane Miller, was a nuclear mechanic on a submarine and he was stationed in Hawaii,” she said. “After he’d gotten out of the military, we needed to make a fresh start and so we chose Raleigh as our new home. I was unemployed, being a stay-at-home mom, and my husband was unemployed, unable to find a job because he was over-qualified. We were at a crossroads.”

In the wake of that visit to B&N that resulted in such disappointment, Scott-Miller recalled, she and Miller told their son, “We’re going to start a bookstore because we know that you need to have a space that is specifically carved out for you.” They initially sold books from the trunk of their car. Citing the family’s experience with the military, Scott-Miller explained that operating a pop-up bookstore that moved around the Research Triangle cities of Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham “was easy for us. It was compartmentalized, it traveled well, and it would allow us to have the mobility we needed without the financial infrastructure of a building.”

Sales remained strong during the pandemic as Liberation Station launched an online bookstore and then spiked during what Scott-Miller called “the awakening” following the murder of George Floyd. Despite their success, the family decided to hold off on moving into a permanent location. “We wanted to be on the ground, with the people who were collectively grieving,” she said. But as they entered 2023, the family decided “the time is now” to move into a permanent location, especially because Miller is now working full-time in a laboratory.

Putting Down Roots

“It felt like this is a good time,” Scott-Miller said. “We need something that will heal our community as we go into an election season. We’re looking at the climate, both the social and literary climate, and what’s going on in the public schools. We’re ready for it. Now we get to create a unique cultural hub that is a community-centered, community-driven space for self-discovery and the activation of our work.”

Scott-Miller said that she and her family take a “collective approach, a family approach” to book buying, explaining that they continually query each other: “ ‘What are your interests right now? What are you curious about? What do you want to discover more about?’ We then go and research those topics, and we look for authors and illustrators who fit the demographic that we wish to serve. And then we buy those books as a family first, for our own home library. It gives us an opportunity to read every book before we put it on the shelf. The selection process is really intentional. Part of the magic of our store is that we have a relationship with every book.”

Liberation Station typically stocks five copies of each title, including Scott-Miller’s own books. She estimates that there are about 400 fiction and nonfiction titles in stock at the store, which is 364 square feet in size. There are also currently 35 boxes of books in storage, available for restocking when necessary.

“I love the fact that we change titles all the time, because our store doesn’t have to be defined,” Scott-Miller said. “The declaration that we hope to make by having this space is that you don’t have to put yourself in a box; you can be an artist one day and a scientist the next. You can have varied interests, and I hope we have something that appeals to you.”

Reading Is a Journey

The store is divided into four topic areas: the “Diaspora Wall” features books that “follow the transatlantic map. Every part of our journey leading up to America is hyper-focused in that space.” The second section is “America—dialing into the vastness of Black childhood, as I like to say,” with books ranging from board books to YA reads by Black authors or illustrators, “including Black authors from Black publishing houses or from Black-led imprints.” The third section, which Scott-Miller is particularly proud of, is called the “Banned Books Wall.” In addition to displaying banned books by Black authors, the store is collaborating with Black educators around the country, asking them, “What do you want in your classroom that is being challenged?” The wall displays photos of the educators who respond, along with a listing of their school district and its location, “and what they hope to gain with the book being accessible in their state.” The fourth section of the store is called “the Anchor,” and features adult books that are paired with children’s books on the same topic or featuring similar themes.

“The goal is that you would take these two titles together and be able to have a conversation with your children about that particular subject.” Book pairings include The Stuff of Stars by Marion Dane Bauer, illustrated by Ekua Holmes, along with Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmic Queries: StarTalk’s Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going.

Another pairing that Scott-Miller is especially excited about is Going Places: Victor Hugo Green and His Glorious Book by Tonya Bolden, illustrated by Eric Velasquez, along with “the actual” Green Book.

“A Black family is an anomaly in a lot of spaces,” Scott-Miller pointed out two weeks after Liberation Station opened for business. “You might come in and see my husband holding a child, or our youngest son, Emerson, coloring with crayons, or you might see Langston playing the cello. It’s so different, the dynamic of our store, because we’re living in it.”