Located in Los Angeles, CA, in the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Mall, second floor, Macy bridge is Malik Books, standing with a very clear and simple message – give voice to the voiceless.
“I grew up in a time when we didn’t even have a lot of children’s books that had images to reflect the African American experience. In the 80s, there were hardly any children’s books. I mean, even greeting cards, there were no African Americans. It was very few,” says Malik Mohammad, the owner of Malik Books.
The inception of this formidable independent bookstore and staple of the Baldwin Hills community began in 1990, not long after Malik graduated from USC. He had an epiphany about looking at the black experience as world history, not just U.S. history, and wanted his community to have the same information.
He says, “I thought, what it did for me, it could do for us. Because [there was] a lack of knowledge for my people so I was like, ‘Man, we need self esteem, we need to know that Black history didn’t start with just slavery, and that Black America started with world history.’ So let’s see if we can open up a bookstore and start having those kinds of books available so that they can change the perception, and we can feel good about ourselves as a people.”