By Holle McDede
East Bay Express

After being a victim of a Ponzi scheme, the nation’s oldest African-American bookstore is recovering from its financial woes. But can it cope with black flight from Oakland?

Twenty months ago, Marcus Books in Oakland was in foreclosure. The owners of the nation’s oldest African-American bookstore had fallen victim to a Ponzi scheme and were facing difficult financial times. They never did get their money back from the people who defrauded them, but in the year and a half since, they kept the doors open and the store is now making a comeback. The business is emerging from its financial woes, has joined the social media generation, and plans to launch a new website soon. But the Oakland icon still faces major hurdles: Its black customer base is fleeing Oakland at a time when the economy remains mired in recession.

Marcus Books was founded in 1960, in the back of a print shop in San Francisco. Its owners, Julian and Raye Richardson, opened the Oakland branch seventeen years later. In the following decades, the size of San Francisco’s black community dropped significantly, but the Oakland store prospered. Over the past ten years, however, Oakland has experienced the same type of black migration that San Francisco did in previous decades. Since 2000, about 25 percent of Oakland’s black population has left the city, the second highest such decline in the state.

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