Days before stepping into the new year, a business owner in North Carolina celebrated a new chapter in her journey. Author and business owner Victoria Scott-Miller celebrated the reopening of Liberation Station, the state’s first Black-owned children’s bookstore.
“It is homecoming. It is homecoming season. It’s homecoming day,” Scott-Miller said during the grand reopening, per Spectrum News 1. “I am so excited to bring this offering back to the community. Not only with myself and my two wonderful sons, but also all of the people who have invested their time, their energy.”
This comes over a year after Miller-Scott was forced to shutter the doors of the bookstore’s first location in downtown Raleigh in April 2024, after reportedly receiving a number of violent threats.
“Unfortunately, we live in a country that has given permission to the nameless and faceless people to make threats and cause harm, emotional harm,” she told WRAL at the time. “We’ve faced numerous threats following the opening of our store. Some we brushed off, while others included a disturbing phone call detailing what our son, Langston, wore when he was at the shop alone.”
Dedicated to ensuring that children of color feel seen, Liberation Station first launched on Juneteenth, 2023. Now, two-plus years later, the store reopened in a new location on what Scott-Miller describes as a “historic Black strip,” on the fourth day of Kwanzaa, a move intended to honor the power of community and the Black dollar.
“Today is important because of Ujamaa, which is the fourth day of Kwanzaa. And what that means is cooperative economics. And I thought that since we are 100% community funded, what better way to show this in action than to open our doors on a day where collective collective action has taken place,” Victoria explained to ABC 11, noting how Black communities helped raise over $70,000 to support the bookstore’s reopening.
“[Ujamaa] means to circulate our dollar to support Black-owned businesses, to ensure that we are supporting one another,” she continued in a separate interview. “And so, I’m excited that we get an opportunity to show what collective action and cooperative economics looks like in real time.”
With shelves filled with Black stories by Black authors, Liberation Station offers a level of representation that is not only informative but also healing for everyone who walks in, regardless of their age.
“Speaking life into children surrounded by stories that represent them is healing. It’s a healing matter,” Scott-Miller shared, explaining how the storefront is healing for older generations, too. “It’s the 25-year-olds, the 30-year-olds, the 40-year-olds that have to ask themselves, I wonder what my life would have been like had I had this.”
Ultimately, whether they’re children or grown adults, the owner is now saying “Welcome home” to everyone who steps into the bookstore.
“To every ancestor who dreamed of freedom made possible by this moment, thank you. Y’all didn’t just show up to a bookstore opening, y’all showed up to tell our children that you are worth this, you’re worth everything,” she concluded.
