"Unlikely Business Owners"

"In Birmingham in the 1930s, a young musician by the name of Herman Blount—later known as Sun Ra, the incomparable jazz bandleader—regularly visited the party's Ella Speed Bookstore, where he enjoyed public lectures and conversations on culture and politics with employees and customers. Decades later in Baltimore, the Black Arts poet Sam Cornish frequented the Free State's successor, the New Era Bookstore, which published one of Cornish’s earliest poetry collections under its in-house Sacco Publishers imprint (named for Sacco and Vanzetti)."

Joshua Clark Davis at Jacobin looks at the history of Communist Party bookstores.