The site of Detroit’s first Black-owned bookstore is one step closer to becoming a national preserved treasure. Vaughn’s Bookstore, once located on the city’s west side on Dexter Ave., is the recipient of a $15,000 preservation grant.
The grant was issued through the National Park Service’s Underrepresented Communities Grant program, which has awarded nearly $3 million since its inception in 2014.
The shop’s owner is former Michigan House of Representatives member Edward “Ed” Vaughn. For 40 years, Vaughn owned and operated the bookstore. “We were a game-changer,” said the former executive to Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Alexander Young.
“There had not been a bookstore here before, and of course I got into the business because I was looking for a book called ‘A Hundred Years of Lynchings’ by Ginsberg, and I was told downtown that they didn’t have the book in stock and I decided that I’d see if I could find it and then when I found it and my friends at the post office said that they’d like to read that and other Black books, so I began to order them and sell them out of the trunk of my car.”
Read full story at Atlanta Black Star here.
