"We Shall Not Be Terrorized Out of Existence"

Abstract

Black activists have been, and continue to be, engaged in a struggle over the meaning of Black identity. This identity struggle has been part and parcel of their overall attempts to defend their communities from racist attacks. Primary aggressors in the discursive component of this struggle have been those White institutional structures that disseminate White racist discourse. Produced via White domination of major social institutions, racist discourse has attempted to subordinate community-defined and validated Black realities by positioning or hiding them beneath or behind stereotypical, monolithic, White-defined reality (Bogle, 1992; Drake, 1990; Gilroy, 1987, 1992; Hall, 1989; King, 1988; Mudimbe, 1988; Omi and Winant 1986; Pietrese, 1993; Wilson, 1995). The objective of this article is to demonstrate that Black British activists developed and controlled Black bookshops as a means to counter this assault on their communities during the late 1960s and 1970s. As politicized entities, these bookshops functioned as Pan-African sites of resistance for the Black British communities. I demonstrate this by presenting the emergence of Black British bookstores, and by examining their goals, their multidimensionality, and the attacks made on them. Conclusions and remarks