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Up in Harlem
By Sharon Y. Lopez

As the glamour and glitter of the Harlem Renaissance climaxed at the end of the 1920s, depression and hard times became the realities of the '30s. Thousands of southern black migrants settled in less than two square miles in Harlem, New York—the nation's black capital.

Among them was Lewis H. Michaux, a small, wiry man with fierce determination who left a secure position as a church deacon to open a bookstore in New York, of all things, when it was commonly doubted whether most blacks knew how to read at all.

He started small, with a hymn book, a Bible and an empty pocketbook.

"Knowledge is power" was his motivation as he hunted through basements in the homes of friends and found five books: on Mary McLeod Bethune, on Harriet Tubman, on Sojourner Truth, on George Washington Carver and Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington. With these treasures and others as he discovered them, he sold books from a pushcart and from the back of his car, sometimes earning only $1.00 a day.

In 1930, when Lewis Michaux opened the National Memorial African Book Store at 2107 Seventh Avenue (now Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.), he slept in the back and washed windows when proceeds from the business could not make ends meet. But the store was destined to succeed, and for 44 years, he maintained the largest, and for most of that time, the only book store in Harlem; a business which earned the reputation as the most complete center for the study of African-American knowledge in the world and eventually grossed over $1,500 a day. By 1970, the store's inventory increased to over a quarter-million books, all of them by for and about black people except one—Webster's dictionary. Ten thousand books a week were shipped to small bookstores and colleges around the country and a branch store was opened in Hamilton, Bermuda.

Located in Harlem Square, and the center for some of black America's largest demonstrations, political rallies, parades and religious meetings, the National Memorial African Bookstore or "House of Common Sense and Proper Propaganda" became a meeting place for scholars, diplomats, students and politicians. While browsing among the clutter of thousands of books along the walls and stacked on the floor in no particular order, you were apt to see an African head of state, or Malcolm X protected by body guards, pouring through books checking facts before delivering one of his fiery speeches. Langston Hughes and Claude McKay dropped in often to discuss the hardships of being a black writer. Kwame Nkrumah visited, as did Sekou Toure, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Eartha Kitt, Louis Armstrong, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Sometimes, black VIP's made speeches inside and loudspeakers carried their voices to the people in the street. Films by Lewis' cousin, Oscar Michaux, a pioneer in black film-making, were screened.

After Congo Premier Patrice Lumumba's assassination by the CIA, Michaux held the African leader's funeral, with coffin and flowers, in the store where paintings, African sculptures, photo-

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[[caption]] Michaux Book Store [[/caption]]

THE CRISIS, October 1981

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