Liberation Station is North Carolina's first and only Black-owned children's bookstore. It reopened last week in Raleigh in a new location after nearly a seven year long journey.
" Liberation Station ... is really a love letter from a black mother to her children that somehow overflowed into the community," said owner Victoria Scott-Miller. " The goal is to show that ... black is vibrant, black is vast, black is glorious."
The journey started when she was shopping for books with her two sons, Langston, now 15 who wants to be an author, and Emerson, now 9 who is autistic and was nonverbal at the time, instead finding solace in reading.
"It took us about four to five hours to find books that represented my children. This is really the first psychological wound that a child feels is to go into a space and see that their existence is optional," said Scott-Miller.
Liberation Station first opened in 2019 in downtown Raleigh on Fayetteville Street. Scott-Miller decided to close it in April 2024 after she and her family received threats. She recounted one incident where someone called the bookstore and described "exactly what my son was wearing."
"It made me realize very early on that black liberation will always face opposition in some way," said Scott-Miller. "It just let me know that we were not in a position to continue doing this work. The political climate was beginning to shift rapidly."
Scott-Miller took time to rest and was looking for schools for her sons when she came across Washington Terrace, a historically Black neighborhood next to St. Augustine's University. As a woman who walks by faith, she said she felt a calling from God telling her this was the next space for Liberation Station.
"I put the GoFundMe up and within 24 hours, we had (raised) $16,000 of a $60,000 goal," said Scott-Miller.
The bookstore is now in a cozy strip mall next to a juice bar, a nail salon and a barber shop. The land this strip mall is on used to be the Seawell Plantation, home to over 90 enslaved people.
"I think it's powerful because it speaks to how we've been able to reclaim space," said Scott-Miller.
Inside the store, a large, gray sectional couch sits in the middle, inviting customers to rest and pull a book off the modest shelves lining the walls. Every book in the store is written by a Black author and first read by Scott-Miller and her family.
"You can't invite people to a feast if you don't know how it tastes. We want people to feast on these books," said Scott-Miller. "We want people to relish in them. We want them to enjoy them."
Liberation Station also houses a food, diaper and pad, or sanitary napkins, pantry. The bookstore will soon host children's programming like cursive writing classes, or paint and sip classes. Additionally, the store has a podcast studio, intended for families to record intergenerational conversations to preserve personal history.
In the future, Scott-Miller hopes to open a second location. For now, she's thankful for her faith, the community's support, and her family.
" I'm grateful to be doing this work alongside my children, who get to see how it's changed me as a woman (and) as a mother, and how it's also changed them and their aspirations."
