‘A passion for my people’: Owner of rare Kansas City bookstore highlights Black words
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Highlighting Black stories
A collection of stories from The Star from the past year centered on Black life across the Kansas City metro.
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Editor’s note: During the month of February, in honor of Black History Month and the vibrant Black community in Kansas City, The Star will feature profiles of Black Kansas Citians by telling their stories and highlighting their businesses, causes and passions.
When Willa Robinson worked as a clerk for the U.S. Post Office in Kansas City, she would walk to a nearby bookstore in Westport and spend the hour-long break she had for lunch searching for books written about and by Black people.
Growing up in Atkins, Arkansas, Robinson developed a love for words at a young age. Her father, an avid reader, could often be found with the Bible, a men’s magazine or a newspaper in hand. But it was in the late 1970s in Kansas City — where her brothers moved for better jobs and she followed, at age 18 — that she began collecting books about the African-American experience.
Now 79, Robinson owns and operates Kansas City’s only bookstore specializing in rare African-American books, she said. About 95% of the books in her store, Willa’s Books and Vinyl, are about Black people and the African diaspora.
“I have a passion for my people, and for our history,” said Robinson, who emphasized the importance of reading authors and historians who accurately chronicled the Black experience. “I think I am doing a service for my community.”
Robinson’s store, which is open from noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, is the first on the left when walking into the front of an office building at 1734 E. 63rd St. in the city’s Citadel neighborhood. It’s hard to miss: Robinson is often playing jazz that can be heard in the hallway, two women passing by said. And on a recent Tuesday, it was the resonance of Hank Crawford’s saxophone.
The location is where Robinson has put down roots, having sold her wares elsewhere throughout the city. In 1994, more than 15 years after she started collecting the books that fill her shelves, Robinson began selling paperbacks as a street vendor in the historic 18th & Vine jazz district. Several years after, she retired from the Post Office, where she had worked for more than three decades.
The years passed and books piled up in Robinson’s home. Her husband asked her, “What are you gonna do with all these books?” Robinson had a friend who wanted to open a store, so in 2007, that’s what they did, at 5535 Troost Ave.
But in 2012, unable to keep up the finances, the store closed its doors, Robinson said. With a warm laugh, though, she adds that she doesn’t do it for the money because she’s not making much anyway. She estimates she sells about 40 books a month.
Three years later, with her desire to provide a space where readers could learn more about Black people’s contributions to the world, she opened her store where it is today, in Suite 110.
“I’ve never seen this many Black books in one place,” customers tell her as they peruse.
W. Paul Coates, founder of the Black Classic Press, which is based in Baltimore and publishes books by and about people of African descent, said independent bookstores often don’t do it for the money, but that the commitment to community is especially true of Black bookstore owners.
“What you have to bring to it, though, is the history that Willa is standing in; she’s standing in a history where people have been lynched, people have been killed, where people have died for the right to read,” Coates said. “Her act of book selling is part of a resistive act of Black resistance that has gone on for the last 200 years or more.”
Unfortunately, Black-owned bookstores are still not common, Coates said. The African American Literature Book Club maintains a list of more than 100 Black-owned stores across the U.S. that focus on Black books. In addition to Robinson’s store, the group lists two others in Missouri: EyeSeeMe in University City and Progressive Emporium & Education Center in St. Louis.
Robinson’s store, like many others, have served as cultural outposts for the Black community, Coates said. Robinson carries several thousand books, including those of Coates’ son, author Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Books about Black life have been more sought after following the killing of George Floyd at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer in May. It opened the eyes of a white community that had not seen that “type of brutality before,” Coates said.
“We still live in a society where information about Black people is not considered as valuable ... as information about white people,” he said. “We’re right now ... experiencing an explosion in Black books that hopefully will change some of that. But the only way we can be sure is that we do have people in line, like Willa, whose willing to go forward with the understanding that you can make a life of doing this, but it won’t necessarily be a financially-rewarding life of doing this.”
‘Representation matters’
Passionate book collectors go everywhere for good deals, including estate and garage sales. When they’re out of town, they wade through thrift shops. Robinson, as she put it, used “to hunt” as well, looking for gems at places like the Salvation Army.
In fact, Robinson has pictures of herself at book sales all over. Ask her about them and she can recall some of her best finds: her excitement of discovering a first edition of Walter Mosley’s 1990 mystery novel “Devil in a Blue Dress,” for example.
“There it was, bright and beautiful,” she remembered.
Some of her finest acquisitions were sold to her by a “hunter” with whom she became friends over the years. He brought her some of the most beautiful books she’d ever seen. She still has some of them, like George Schuyler’s 1931 “Black No More.”
Of the titles in her store, the rarest go for more than $1,000 a piece. She carries books by Paul Laurence Dunbar that date back to the 1890s, as well as newer ones, like President Barack Obama’s 2020 memoir “A Promised Land.”
Among the books she recommends people read during Black History Month, Robinson pointed to one of her personal favorites, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” by Isabel Wilkerson.
In the coming years, Robinson — who has 13 grandchildren and five great grandchildren — plans to close her store, which also carries vintage magazines and thousands of records. But she would prefer to sell it, so someone can carry on the tradition.
There used to be two other bookstores in the metro area that specialized in African-American literature, including Culturally Speaking, which was once in the Historic Lincoln Building. Both have since closed, she said.
“And so that leaves me the only one,” Robinson said.
At least two other, newer companies that sell books in Kansas City are run by Black women who are looking for brick-and-mortar locations.
One of them, Bliss Books & Wine, was launched in May 2019 by sisters La’Nae Robinson, 40, and La’Nesha Frazier, 37. The concept was born when they thought they needed a place to decompress, like their husbands do at sports bars.
The two had been hosting in-person pop-ups and author events at different places before the COVID-19 pandemic forced closures. They have been selling online and hope to open a store by the end of the year, possibly in the Midtown area.
Frazier said her and her sister’s business has not honed in on a particular genre or culture. But she’d like to inspire young girls who will soon walk into her Black-owned, woman-run bookstore.
“Representation matters,” Frazier said. “If I take my kids to all of these bookstores, and they don’t see themselves, what is that really telling them?”
The other business, Aya Coffee and Books, started in April and is also taking orders online. Its owner, Jahna Riley, said it recently hosted its first in a series of Saturday pop-up events for Black History Month; the first was at Café Corazón, the next will be at Blip Roasters.
Riley, 33, said it’s important to celebrate Black history, which is about more than enslavement. Her store, which she plans to open on the East Side by the start of 2022 with an array of genres, will focus on the Black experience, from its music to decor.
Willa Robinson has built and started a “really strong legacy,” Riley said. She said she is excited to be a part of the book selling community, and said there is room for each entrepreneur.
“If there’s anybody else who wants to come into the space of book selling, I think there’s a world in which we can all work together to make our city better,” Riley said.
Robinson called her book selling an act of resistance to ignorance, to not having accurate history or information about the Black community. She noted that for years, she never saw an obituary or wedding notice for Black residents in The Star, for example. There needs to be more acknowledgment of the excellence in the city’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, she said.
“Our kids are doing great things, but it’s never documented in the white area,” she said.
This story was originally published February 10, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
